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THE  CITY  OF  THE 
DINNER-PAIL 


THE   CITY  OF 
THE    DINNER-PAIL 


BY 


JONATHAN  THAYER  LINCOLN 


BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

(Cbe  Bitaetj^tie  \^tt0  €ambnti0e 

1909 


C»PTRIGRT,  1909,  BT  JONATHAK  TRATSR  LINCOLN 
ALL    RIGHTS   RESERVED 

J*ublisk«d  Stptimber  iq/oct 


COtTOH  PUtLIC  tl»RAI»t 

EX. 


a^M.<XJK%^-».».M.  A 


UMVERsrrfbP  Sat.ifo 

SANTA  BARBARA 


TO   MY   WIFE 


^nf 


CONTENTS 

I.  The  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail  l 

II.  The  Average  Citizen  and  the  Labor  Prob- 
lem 37 

III.  The  Man  and  the  Machine  63 

IV.  The  Time-Clock  95 
V.  Trade-Unionism  and  the  Individual  Worker  123 

VI.  The  City  of  Luxury  157 


*^*  These  chapters  first  appeared  in  Tht  Atlantic  Monthly  and  The 
Outlook,  and  are  here  reprinted  by  permission  of  the  publishers  of  those 
magazines. 


\   a  lL 


I 

THE  CITY  OF  THE  DINNER-PAIL 


THE    CITY  OF  THE 
DINNER-PAIL 

THERE  are  cities  in  America  nearly  if 
not  quite  as  cosmopolitan  in  popula- 
tion as  Fall  River, — the  City  of  the  Dinner- 
Pail,  I  like  to  call  it, — but  none  in  which 
the  people  of  many  lands  are  so  intimately 
associated  in  their  daily  lives;  for  the  in- 
dustry of  this  manufacturing  community  is 
not  diversified,  there  is  no  opportunity  for 
the  people  of  different  ancestry  to  follow 
this  or  that  occupation — they  must  all 
make  cotton  cloth  or  perish ;  and  so  it  is  that 
the  children  of  Shem,  Ham,  and  Japheth 
live  and  toil  side  by  side.  There  are  nearly 
one  hundred  cotton  factories  in  the  City  of 
the  Dinner-Pail,  operated  by  half  as  many 
corporations.  Over  three  million  spindles 
and  nearly  one  hundred  thousand  looms 
whir  and  clatter  within  the  granite  walls  of 


4  THE  CITY  OF 

the  factories,  and  from  daylight  until  dark 
nearly  thirty  thousand  men  and  women  earn 
their  daily  bread  making  cotton  cloth. 

Years  ago  thrifty  New  England  folk  built 
mills  along  the  wooded  banks  of  the  river 
which  furnished  power  for  the  machinery, 
and  less  successful  New  England  folk  oper- 
ated the  spinning-frames  and  looms.  The 
factories  were  small,  and  the  city  then  was 
nothing  more  than  a  little  manufacturing 
town.  As  the  cotton  industry  developed, 
the  village  grew;  newer  and  larger  facto- 
ries were  built ;  English  and  Irish  workers 
came,  then  French  Canadians,  and  finally 
Portuguese  and  Italians,  Armenians  and 
Russians,  Polanders,  Swedes,  Norwegians, 
—  the  people  of  every  race  and  language. 
The  city  now  numbers  one  hundred  and 
twenty  thousand  souls,  and  is  the  centre  of 
one  of  the  greatest  industries  in  the  country. 
There  are  those  who  shun  the  City  of  the 
Dinner-Pail  as  if  it  were  the  City  of  Dread- 
ful Night;  they  gather  their  skirts  about 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  5 

them  and  pass  it  by,  little  knowing  the  vast- 
ness  of  its  human  interest,  little  dreaming 
of  the  poetry  that  lies  beneath  the  smoke 
pouring  from  the  factory  chimneys. 

Fortune  has  never  been  kinder  to  me 
than  on  the  Sunday  morning  when  I  first 
went  to  service  at  St.  John's  Church,  in  the 
City  of  the  Dinner-Pail.  I  was  a  very  young 
man  then,  but  one  year  out  of  college,  and 
just  commencing  business.  At  the  univer- 
sity I  had  formed  many  friendships,  and 
had  become,  by  some  kindly  chance,  one 
of  a  little  company  of  men,  slightly  older 
than  myself,  living  in  Boston — an  inter- 
esting literary  group;  all  clever  men,  and 
some  of  undoubted  though  untried  genius. 
Since  then  one  of  the  number  has  written 
some  of  the  sweetest  verses  in  our  language; 
one  has  made  his  name  familiar  to  every 
lover  of  Gothic  architecture ;  one  has  writ- 
ten essays  which  to  me  at  least  are  as  sweet 
and  fanciful  as  those  of  the  gentle  Elia; 
and  one  has  painted  pictures  of  rare  beauty. 


6  THE  CITY  OF 

Some  have  failed,  poor  chaps,  their  genius 
turning  out  to  be  mere  talent ;  and  one 
whose  mind  was  keenest  and  whose  soul 
was  sweetest  died  before  his  days  of  ap- 
prenticeship were  done.  We  used  to  meet 
in  an  attic  over  a  paint-shop  in  the  heart 
of  the  busy  city,  and  discuss  with  youthful 
enthusiasm  the  absorbing  problems  of  the 
day.  We  were  all  idealists,  despising  Mr. 
Howells  and  the  writers  of  his  school, 
while  our  enthusiasm  for  George  Mere- 
dith knew  no  bounds.  We  were  devout 
followers  of  the  Pre-Raphaelite  brother- 
hood, and  worshiped  the  name  of  William 
Morris;  we  hated  the  rush  and  hurry  of  a 
commercial  age,  and  railed  at  "  progress  ** 
when  understood  to  mean  electric  cars  and 
telephones  —  in  a  word,  we  believed  that 
mankind  had  been  brutalized  by  machin- 
ery, and  our  mission  was  to  preach  the 
gospel  of  John  Ruskin  and  save  America 
from  the  hands  of  the  Philistines. 

Returning  to  the  City  of  the  Dinner- 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  7 

Pail,  I  found  myself  in  a  different  atmos- 
phere. Rossetti'sname  was  nextto  unknown; 
Morris  may  have  been  thought  of  as  the  in- 
ventor of  a  comfortable  easy-chair,  but  not 
a  single  Kelmscott  book  was  owned  in  the 
city.  And  as  for  George  Meredith,  if  one  of 
his  novels  strayed  from  its  shelf  in  the  Pub- 
lic Library,  it  was  because  some  immature 
young  person  believed  him  to  be  the  author 
of  "Lucille."  The  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail 
was  then,  as  it  is  now,  the  busiest  of  New 
England  manufacturing  towns,  a  workaday 
city  where  no  vice  was  so  disgraceful  as 
idleness;  where  thousands  of  men  and 
women,  yes,  and  children  too,  toiled  from 
early  morning  until  nightfall  in  the  facto- 
ries, earning  their  daily  bread ;  where  the 
manufacturers  themselves  worked  early  and 
late  at  their  desks,  and  where  the  talk  even 
of  the  home  centred  on  business. 

One  day,  as  I  was  busy  at  my  desk  over 
a  particularly  elusive  trial  balance,  a  man 
older  than  myself  by  about  four  years  en- 


8  THE  CITY  OF 

tered  the  office.  He  was  an  athletic  young 
fellow,  whose  face  indicated  a  cheerful, 
energetic  disposition,  and  his  dress  marked 
him  as  an  Episcopal  clergyman.  His  errand 
was  quickly  explained.  He  had  remem- 
bered me  as  a  member  of  his  college  so- 
ciety. His  parish  was  composed  of  English 
operatives,  and,  as  the  winter  had  been 
unusually  severe,  many  of  his  parishioners 
were  in  need.  One  case  particularly  inter- 
ested him,  and  he  asked  me  to  help  him 
find  employment  for  the  man.  There  was 
a  peculiar  charm  of  manner,  a  mingling  of 
sincerity  and  good  humor,  of  common  sense 
and  enthusiasm,  about  the  rector  of  St. 
John's  which  at  once  attracted  me  to  him, 
and  led  me  the  next  Sunday  to  accept  his 
cordial  invitation  to  attend  service  at  his 
church.  I  found  St.  John's  an  unpreten- 
tious Gothic  structure  of  native  granite, 
situated  a  mile  or  more  from  the  centre  of 
the  city.  There  were  good  lines  enough  in 
the  building  to  suggest,  in  a  crude  way,  some 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  9 

little  English  parish  church ;  and,  upon  en- 
tering it,  the  suggestion  became  complete. 
I  felt  myself  for  a  moment  in  the  "  old 
country,"  and,  listening  to  the  responses, 
heard  the  dialect  of  Lancashire.  The  illu- 
sion was,  however,  only  for  the  moment ; 
with  the  voices  speaking  the  dialect  of  a 
country  beyond  sea  were  mingled  the  nasal 
tones  of  New  England;  for  in  St.  John's 
parish  Yankee  sons  are  begotten  of  English 
fathers.  The  Protestant  Episcopal  Church 
is  the  one  heirloom  left  to  us  by  England, 
when  she  officially  departed  from  our  shores, 
which  time  has  altered  least.  To  thousands 
in  our  generation  it  proclaims  the  message 
that  the  splendid  history  of  England  is  our 
history  too  —  that  all  her  glorious  tradi- 
tions are  ours  by  right  of  inheritance ;  and 
as  I  sat  in  St.  John's  Church  that  Sunday 
morning  listening  to  the  responses  in  which 
were  mingled  the  dialects  of  Lancashire 
and  New  England,  I  was  alive,  as  never  be- 
fore, to  the  grandeur  of  this  heritage.  And 


lo  THE  CITY  OF 

what  hearty  responses  these  were!  Listening, 
I  understood  that  the  people  of  St.  John's 
worshiped  God  with  whole  hearts.  It  was 
hard  to  realize  that  these  people,  devout, 
single-hearted,  enthusiastic  in  their  quest 
for  truth,  were  the  same  men  and  women 
who,  working  at  the  spinning-frame  and 
loom,  had  so  often  seemed  to  be  merely 
the  vital  part  of  the  machinery.  That  mo- 
ment I  determined  to  know  them  better, 
and  I  here  record  with  love  and  gratitude 
that  many  of  the  happiest  hours  of  my  life 
have  been  spent  in  their  companionship. 
When  I  left  St.  John's  that  Sunday  morn- 
ing, I  realized  that  the  life  about  me  was 
not  the  dismal,  sordid  thing  that  fancy  had 
painted  it,  but,  instead,  possessed  an  interest 
passing  the  imagination ;  and  with  an  un- 
wonted enthusiasm  I  sought  to  find  my  own 
place  in  it. 

At  half-past  five  each  morning  in  the 
City  of  the  Dinner-Pail  the  factory  bells 
ring  out  in  merry  chorus;  only  the  older 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  ii 

factories  keep  up  the  custom,  but  they  are 
so  numerous  that  the  bells  are  heard  from 
one  end  of  the  city  to  the  other.  On  many 
a  dark  winter  morning  the  sound  of  the  bells 
has  awakened  me  to  reflect  for  a  moment  on 
the  lot  of  those  who  "  get  up  by  night  and 
dress  by  yellow  candle-light "  ;  and  I  have 
returned  to  my  dreams  while  already  the 
streets  were  beginning  to  be  thronged  with 
the  army  of  the  dinner-pail.  And  what  a 
motley  army  it  is  which,  in  the  early  morn- 
ing, hurries  through  the  streets  to  the  day's 
work  in  the  many  factories !  It  is  composed 
of  men  and  women  of  every  race  and  lan- 
guage—  the  greatest  numbers,  however, 
being  of  French,  Irish,  and  English  parent- 
age. 

The  French  Canadian  population,  num- 
bering about  thirty-five  thousand,  is  cen- 
tralized in  the  eastern  part  of  the  city. 
Walking  the  streets,  one  hears  French 
spoken  quite  as  often  as  English ;  boarding- 
houses  bear  the  sign  of  "  Maison  de  Pen- 


12  THE  CITY  OF 

sion,"  while  other  signs  over  the  shop-doors 
set  forth  in  French  the  dealer's  wares.  High 
on  a  hill  overlooking  the  beautiful  lakes 
which  skirt  the  city  to  the  eastward  stands 
Notre  Dame  College,  in  which  are  en- 
rolled over  twelve  hundred  students,  and 
near  the  college  buildings  towers  the  great 
church  of  Notre  Dame.  In  the  adjoining 
streets  are  the  parochial  residence,  the  con- 
vent, and  the  schools.  Not  far  away  is  the 
office  of  "L'Independant,"  a  daily  paper 
of  no  mean  circulation,  printed  in  French. 
In  its  columns  may  be  found  recorded  the 
meetings  of  such  societies  as  the  Ligue  des 
Patriotes,  the  Garde  Napoleon,  the  Society 
de  St.  Jean  Baptiste,  and  such  clubs  as  the 
LaurierandLaBoucane,  the  Cercle  Mont- 
calm, and  a  score  of  others. 

As  one  walks  the  streets  of  the  French 
quarter  it  is  hard  to  believe  one's  self  in  a 
New  England  city.  If  one  were  to  enter 
the  houses,  this  belief  would  be  even  more 
difficult ;  here  he  would  find  customs  very 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  13 

foreign  to  the  soil  in  which  they  flourish ; 
he  would  hear  the  affairs  of  the  home  dis- 
cussed in  a  foreign  tongue;  he  would  find 
no  trace  of  the  Puritan  traditions  deep- 
rooted  in  another  section  of  the  city  among 
the  few  thousand  of  New  England  descent 
who  dwell  there,  but,  instead,  the  tradi- 
tions of  a  Latin  race.  While  he  would  find 
so  much  that  was  foreign  in  suggestion,  he 
would,  however,  discover,  if  he  looked  be- 
neath the  surface,  a  deep-rooted  American- 
ism ;  for  these  people  are  loyal  citizens  of  the 
United  States.  The  French  voters  who  go 
to  the  polls  take  a  keen  interest  in  politics ; 
they  influence  new  immigrants  to  become 
naturalized,  and,  when  their  papers  are 
received,  to  exercise  the  right  of  suflfrage. 
Here,  as  in  their  northern  homes,  the 
French  Canadians  run  slight  risk  of  ex- 
tinction through  race  suicide,  for  their  fam- 
ilies are  large.  I  have  heard  of  instances 
where  the  children  of  the  same  parents 
numbered  more  than  twenty,  and  families 


14  THE  CITY  OF 

of  twelve  and  fourteen  occasion  no  com- 
ment among  them.  Large  families  beget 
either  shiftlessness  or  thrift,  and  in  the  pre- 
sent instance  it  is  the  latter  which  obtains, 
for  thrift  is  the  predominant  characteristic 
in  the  homes  of  the  French  quarter.  The 
French  Canadian  loves  the  dollar ;  he  dreads 
nothing  more  than  a  strike,  because  a  strike 
enforces  idleness,  and  idleness  entails  loss 
of  wages.  There  are  no  French  Canadian 
labor  leaders. 

The  Irishman  who  makes  his  home  in 
the  city  is  the  same  Irishman  who  makes 
his  home  everywhere  in  the  land  — as  he 
himself  might  state  it.  There  are  twenty- 
five  thousand  Irish- Americans  in  the  City 
of  the  Dinner-Pail ;  the  ancestors  of  some 
came  before  the  first  factory  was  built ;  and 
many  an  Irish  family  can  claim  to  be  among 
the  oldest  in  the  community.  From  these 
families  come  many  of  the  foremost  citi- 
zens, conspicuous  in  every  profession  as 
well  as  in  every  trade  and  craft.  Most  of 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  15 

the  twenty-five  thousand,  however,  came 
in  recent  years :  some  came  yesterday,  fresh 
from  the  old  sod,  as  green  as  their  emer- 
ald isle,  clad  in  homespun,  and  speaking 
an  unintelligible  dialect ;  but  before  a  de- 
cade has  passed,  all  will  have  become  en- 
thusiastic citizens  of  the  great  Republic. 

The  English  operatives,  some  of  whom 
we  have  seen  at  their  devotions  in  St.  John's 
Church,  bring  with  them  the  customs  and 
traditions  of  the  old  country.  They  give 
tea-parties  at  which  the  guests  sing  unend- 
ing ballads  to  monotonous  music;  Shrove 
Tuesday  brings  the  inevitable  pancake, 
Christmas  its  plum  pudding  and  the  Yule 
log.  Perhaps  at  Christmas-time  transplanted 
traditions  are  most  in  evidence,  for  at  this 
season  of  the  year  the  hearts  of  men  go  out 
to  all  mankind,  and  in  the  cosmopolitan 
community  each  speaks  his  message  in  his 
own  tongue,  and,  as  in  the  day  of  Pente- 
cost, each  hears  the  message  of  the  others 
in  his  own  language.  The  English  trim 


i6  THE  CITY  OF 

their  churches  with  their  own  hands — it 
is  no  meaningless  ceremony  with  them; 
they  gather  the  greens  and  wreathe  the 
holly  to  welcome  the  coming  of  the  Christ 
Child.  On  Christmas  Eve  the  candles  are 
lighted  in  many  homes,  and  shine  a  wel- 
come through  the  windows  to  the  wayfarer ; 
and,  best  of  all,  after  the  midnight  service 
in  the  church,  the  waits  go  about  the  sleep- 
ing city — no  whir  of  spindles  or  clatter  of 
loom  is  then  heard — singing  carols.  The 
voices  of  the  singers  ring  out  on  the  winter 
air:  — 

It  came  upon  the  midnight  clear. 

That  glorious  song  of  old, 
From  angels  bending  near  the  earth 

To  touch  their  harps  of  gold : 
Peace  on  the  earth,  good  will  to  men 

From  Heaven's  all-gracious  King. 
The  world  in  solemn  stillness  lay 

To  hear  the  angels  sing. 

And  those  who  sing  this  carol  are  the  same 
men  and  women  who  throughout  the  year 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  17 

stand  beside  the  spinning-frame  and  loom 
in  the  noisy  factories. 

A  description  even  of  the  Christmas  cus- 
toms of  the  folk  of  the  many  nations  who 
work  side  by  side  in  the  mills  would  fill 
many  pages;  and  a  volume  which  should 
include  also  a  description  of  the  Old  World 
traditions  which  survive  in  the  family  life 
would  be  of  vital  interest  to  the  student  of 
sociology ;  for  the  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail 
strikingly  illustrates  the  wonderful  process 
of  assimilation  which  is  going  on  through- 
out our  country.  Each  year  immigrants 
from  every  nation  under  heaven  come  to  our 
shores,  and  are  transformed  into  loyal  citi- 
zens. It  is,  happily,  not  true  that  the  tradi- 
tions of  the  old  home  vanish  in  a  moment 
as  by  a  miracle ;  they  remain,  slightly  modi- 
fied perhaps,  for  generations ;  but  they  sur- 
vive in  the  home,  not  in  the  civic  life;  and 
the  survival  of  these  customs  lends  a  peculiar 
charm  to  the  study  of  life  among  the  toilers. 

Some    one    has    facetiously   said    that 


1 8  THE  CITY  OF 

"American"  was  spoken  at  the  building 
of  the  tower  of  Babel.  Underlying  this  say- 
ing is  a  truth  which  one  can  easily  under- 
stand by  walking,  some  Saturday  evening, 
through  the  main  street  of  the  City  of  the 
Dinner-Pail.  Years  ago,  when  the  great 
city  was  an  insignificant  factory  town,  and 
all  the  spindles  in  operation  would  not  equip 
the  smallest  of  its  many  mills  to-day;  when 
these  spindles  were  tended  by  the  sons  and 
daughters  of  farmer-folk,  whose  grandchil- 
dren now  look  pityingly  at  the  operatives 
returning  from  the  day's  work,  dinner-pail 
in  hand;  when  the  sight  of  any  of  the  for- 
eigners who  crowd  the  streets  to-day  (the 
Italian  woman,  her  head  surmounted  by  a 
huge  bundle  tied  up  in  a  bright  shawl ;  the 
pretty  French  girl,  dressed  stylishly,  if 
cheaply ;  the  Portuguese  laborer  smoking 
his  cigarette;  the  long-bearded  rabbi;  the 
Dominican  monk  in  the  garb  of  his  order) 
would  have  created  a  stir  of  excitement  to 
be  talked  of  for  days  in  the  community,  — 


THE  DINNER-PAIL   •       19 

years  ago  it  was  the  custom  of  the  village 
folk,  after  their  Saturday  supper  of  baked 
beans  and  cold  corned  beef,  to  go  "down 
street,"  as  the  saying  was.  The  shops  were 
open,  and  thither  went  the  village  folk  to 
make  the  week's  purchases,  pay  the  past 
week's  bills,  and,  if  the  night  were  pleasant, 
leisurely  to  walk  up  and  down  the  street. 
Besides  this  the  village  offered  meagre  pas- 
time for  its  people.  Nor  was  there  great 
need  for  amusement,  save  on  Saturday 
nights ;  for  work  began  at  sunrise  and  ended 
at  sunset,  and  it  was  only  on  the  evening 
before  the  Sabbath  that  the  good  people  of 
the  town  were  inclined  to  sit  up  o'  nights. 
When  the  mills  multiplied  and  the  for- 
eigners came,  they,  too,  took  up  the  custom 
of  going  "  down  street,"  and  this  custom  has 
survived  until  to-day.  On  other  evenings 
Main  Street  presents  no  unusual  appearance, 
but  on  Saturday  night  the  sidewalks  for  a 
distance  of  half  a  mile  north  and  south  of 
City  Hall  —  the  limits  of  the  village  street 


20  THE  CITY  OF 

as  it  was  in  the  old  days — are  crowded  with 
good-natured,  laughing  men  and  women. 
Nowhere  in  the  world,  not  even  on  Broad- 
way or  Piccadilly,  could  we  find  a  crowd 
more  dense.  It  is  interesting  to  note  that 
this  unusually  crowded  condition  is  limited 
to  a  single  mile  of  sidewalk  in  the  very 
centre  of  the  city;  that  the  crowding  begins 
at  about  seven  in  the  evening  and  ceases 
at  nine,  as  abruptly  as  it  begins;  that  the 
greatest  numbers  promenade  on  one  side  of 
the  street,  which  must  have  been  the  "  pro- 
per side "  in  the  old  days;  and  that  the  vast 
throng  congested  within  these  narrow  lim- 
its seems  bent  on  no  business.  The  shops 
are  open  and  are  well  patronized,  but 
the  number  of  shoppers  is  insignificant 
compared  with  the  thousands  who  walk 
aimlessly  along,  an  irresistible  current  of 
humanity. 

What  multitudes  of  events  in  every  land 
under  heaven  have  contributed  to  gather 
here  these  men  and  women  of  so  diverse 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  21 

heritage !  Here  are  united  the  strength  and 
vigor  of  the  North,  the  gentle,  careless  spirit 
of  the  South;  here  East  meets  West,  and  all 
are  welded  in  a  mighty  whole.  What  mean- 
ing has  their  presence  here  to  us  who  seek 
to  understand  the  "Social  Question,"  who 
seek  to  solve  the  "Labor  Problem"? 

The  first  fact —  so  evident  that  a  specific 
statement  of  it  seems  unnecessary — is  this: 
every  man  and  woman  making  up  this 
throng  is  a  human  being,  an  individual, 
distinct  and  difl?erent  from  every  other 
individual  that  God  has  created.  Evident 
as  is  the  fact,  there  is  a  tendency  in  our 
time  to  neglect  its  meaning.  Our  very 
phraseology  when  we  refer  to  these  work- 
ing men  and  women  indicates  the  trend ;  we 
speak  of  the  labor  element,  the  labor  vote, 
the  demands  of  labor,  when  we  mean  the 
workers:  the  individuals  who  toil  in  the 
factories,  the  votes  of  these  individual 
workers,  and  the  demands  for  better  con- 
ditions of  life  which  these  individuals,  act- 


22  THE  CITY  OF 

ing  with  a  common  impulse,  make  upon 
their  employers.  In  the  old  days  "help" 
was  the  word  used  to  designate  the  work- 
ers, and  this  difference  in  language  has  a 
deeper  significance  than  at  first  appears.  It 
means  that  men  and  women  who  in  the 
early  days  of  the  factory  system  helped  their 
employers — that  is,  were  associated  with 
them  in  the  manufacture  of  cotton  cloth 
— now  sell  their  labor  as  they  might  sell 
coal  and  cotton  were  they  dealers  in  these 
commodities,  and  that  somehow,  in  the 
complicated  development  of  the  factory 
system,  the  individuality  of  these  workers 
has  been  so  merged  with  the  great  machine 
of  which  they  are  the  parts,  that  in  our 
common  speech  we  fail  to  make  the  proper 
distinction  between  labor  and  the  laborer, 
between  the  commodity  and  the  man  who 
sells  the  commodity. 

If  we  were  to  follow  these  men  and  wo- 
men to  the  thousand  homes  to  which  they 
will  return,  we  should  find  these  homes 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  23 

far  more  attractive  than  the  average  citizen 
is  prone  to  think.  We  should  also  come  to 
know  the  workers  as  individuals,  and  in  our 
minds  separate  the  commodity  from  the 
man  who  sells  the  commodity;  and,  be- 
coming acquainted  with  these  persons  in 
their  homes,  we  should  learn  to  use  dis- 
crimination in  accepting  as  truth  much  that 
is  written  about  them  in  sensational  mag- 
azine articles,  much  that  is  printed  in  the 
authoritative-looking  volumes  of  the  doc- 
tors of  philosophy. 

In  the  last  generation  the  factory  day 
began  at  dawn  and  ended  at  nightfall.  Then, 
as  now,  some  workers  were  contented  and 
some  rebellious ;  by  turns  the  ten-hour  and 
the  eight-hour  day  were  heralded  as  the 
dawn  of  the  workingman's  hope ;  but  still 
some  are  satisfied  and  some  discontented. 
In  our  vain  efforts  to  solve  the  labor  prob- 
lem we  rush  from  one  ineffectual  remedy 
to  another,  because  we  are  unable  to  view 
the  problem  in  its  true  perspective.  If  we 


24  THE  CITY  OF 

could  follow  the  men  and  women  who 
crowd  the  main  street  of  the  City  of  the 
Dinner- Pail  each  Saturday  evening,  if  we 
could  go  to  their  homes,  and  become  ac- 
quainted with  the  worker  as  an  individual, 
many  errors  that  now  distort  our  vision 
would  be  corrected. 

At  half-past  five  each  morning  in  the 
City  of  the  Dinner-Pail  the  factory  bells 
ring  out  in  merry  chorus,  and  half  an  hour 
later  the  streets  are  thronged  with  the  army 
of  the  dinner-pail,  hurrying  to  the  day's 
work  in  the  factories.  Twenty-seven  thou- 
sand men  and  women  make  up  this  host  of 
labor — men  and  women,  that  is  the  fact  to 
be  remembered.  Once  in  the  factory,  they 
will  become  the  vital  part  of  the  great 
machine  which  annually  turns  out  so  many 
million  yards  of  cotton  cloth ;  but  now,  as 
they  hurry  to  the  day's  work,  we  recog- 
nize in  each  an  individual  human  soul, 
separate  and  distinct  from  every  other. 
Fearful  injustice  has  been  done  these  men 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  25 

and  women  by  persons  with  the  best  in- 
tentions— persons  who  write  books  about 
them,  slandering  their  manhood  and  their 
womanhood.  This  army  lives  on  frugal 
rations,  fights  hard,  sleeps  well,  every  year 
advances,  never  retreats.  The  social  unrest 
that  so  many  talk  about  and  fear  is  a  healthy 
unrest — it  is  the  sign  of  social  progress. 

Less  than  a  century  ago,  when  the  fac- 
tory bells  rang  out  upon  the  morning 
air,  what  manner  of  men  and  women 
responded  to  the  call  ?  New  England  folk, 
•men  and  women,  boys  and  girls  from  the 
neighboring  farms.  To-day  their  children 
own  these  factories,  and  the  Yankee  oper- 
ative has  all  but  disappeared.  The  English 
followed,  then  the  French,  not  to  starve 
and  fail,  but  to  follow  the  law  of  human 
progress.  In  every  generation  of  these  fac- 
tory-folk men  and  women  appear  in  whom 
is  embodied  the  aspiration  of  the  class,  the 
aspiration  which  underlies  the  social  un- 
rest. The  immediate  cause  of  that  unrest 


26  THE  CITY  OF 

may  be  some  condition  incident  to  the 
factory  system,  but  these  immediate  causes 
are  not  primal  causes;  the  fundamental 
cause  is  inherent  in  that  impulse  of  the 
race  that  compels  it  to  rise  from  worse  to 
better,  from  better  to  best. 

The  case  of  an  elderly  slasher-tender 
with  whom  I  am  acquainted  is  an  instance 
of  this  impulse  working  in  the  individual. 
This  man  was  a  Lancashire  operative  of 
the  class  that  supplanted  the  Yankee  worker 
when,  in  the  process  of  social  evolution, 
the  New  Englander  ceased  to  tend  the  ma- 
chinery in  the  factories.  He  and  his  wife 
took  equal  chances  with  the  other  opera- 
tives in  the  mills,  they  worked  under  the 
same  conditions,  with  equal  opportunities, 
yet  they  were  able  to  send  their  children 
to  high  school  and  normal  school,  and  thus 
the  latter  became  teachers  instead  of  weav- 
ers ;  their  grandchildren  will  go  to  college, 
and,  alas !  will  forget  the  link  that  unites 
them  with  the  toilers.    The  case  of  the 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  27 

slasher- tender  is  not  peculiar;  there  are 
many  hundred  such  cases  in  the  City  of 
the  Dinner-Pail.  He  is  not  some  meteor- 
like exception  of  a  man  who  rises  from 
rail-splitter  to  President  and  is  used  by  the 
preacher  as  an  example  with  which  to 
exhort  listless  boys ;  he  is  typical  of  a  phase 
of  the  industrial  question  that  the  reform- 
ers have  overlooked. 

We  see  evidences  of  the  working  of  the 
law  of  human  progress  in  classes  of  toilers, 
here  in  the  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail,  as 
well  as  in  individuals.  Matthew  Arnold 
suggested  culture  as  the  antidote  for  an- 
archy. Mr.  Frederic  Harrison  and  the  re- 
formers laughed  at  him.  "  Do  something," 
they  cried;  "do  something;  no  good  can 
come  of  dreaming ;  culture  cannot  put  food 
into  infants'  mouths."  Reformers  then,  as 
now,  were  in  a  hurry.  But  the  poet  was 
\viser  than  the  reformers  knew.  Here,  in 
the  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail,  the  English 
replaced  the  Yankee  workers,  and  French 


28  THE  CITY  OF 

Canadians  are  replacing  the  English.  The 
Yankees  did  not  starve,  and  the  English 
are  not  starving.  The  Yankees  became 
manufacturers,  they  became  clerks  and  mer- 
chants and  doctors  and  lawyers  and  teach- 
ers; and  the  English  are  following  in  the 
footsteps  of  the  Yankee.  Every  individual 
did  not  rise;  thousands  failed  hopelessly, 
—  that  is  the  law,  —  individuals  perished, 
but  the  type  survived,  and  in  surviving  ad- 
vanced. The  English  replaced  the  Yankee, 
and  the  French  are  replacing  the  English, 
and  in  the  life  of  the  French-Canadian 
operative  I  see  an  evidence  of  the  law  of 
progress  working  in  a  way  that  suggests 
Matthew  Arnold's  remedy. 

I  have  already  referred  to  the  great  church 
of  Notre  Dame,  which,  surrounded  by  the 
college  building,  the  convent,  and  the 
schools,  stands  high  on  the  hill  overlook- 
ing the  city.  You  may  say  that  that  minster, 
the  spires  of  which  may  be  seen  for  miles 
about,  stands  for  the  power  of  the  Roman 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  29 

Church,  and  so  it  does.  But  it  stands  for 
a  power  mightier  still  than  the  ecclesias- 
tical dominion  of  the  Bishop  of  Rome ;  it 
stands  for  the  aspiration  of  the  race ;  and, 
in  a  particular  sense,  it  stands  for  the  law 
of  human  progress  at  work  among  the 
French- Canadian  operatives.  Who  built 
that  great  church  high  on  the  hill  over- 
looking the  city  ?  It  was  built  by  French- 
Canadian  operatives,  —  thousands  of  them, 
—  each  giving  his  mite  from  the  meagre 
wages  earned  day  in  and  day  out,  standing 
beside  the  spinning-frame  and  loom.  Many 
hundred  thousand  dollars  in  wages  is  the 
measure  of  their  sacrifice.  The  church  is 
built  in  mighty  proportions;  the  aspira- 
tion which  built  it  is  a  mighty  aspiration. 
But  if  you  come  to  study  the  building 
with  the  eye  of  an  architect,  forgetting  its 
real  meaning,  you  will  see  recorded  in  its 
stones  the  fact  that  the  aspiration,  mighty 
though  it  be,  is  at  the  same  time  crude  and 
uneducated.    Had  Ruskin  seen  that  build- 


30  THE  CITY  OF 

ing,  he  would  have  had  another  argument 
to  show  the  brutalizing  effect  of  machin- 
ery. The  church  is  neither  classical,  nor 
Gothic,  nor  Byzantine,  nor  Egyptian,  but 
a  very  hodgepodge  of  every  order  of  archi- 
tecture in  the  history  of  that  useful  art. 
But  who  was  the  architect?  From  what 
class  did  he  spring?  From  the  same  class 
to  which  belong  the  men  and  women  who 
built  the  church  by  their  sacrifice.  And 
when  the  building  in  all  its  rawness,  but 
in  all  its  vast  proportions  too,  was  com- 
pleted, these  same  operatives  gave  again, 
each  his  mite,  and  an  Italian  painter  of 
great  talent — some  of  us  believe  great  gen- 
ius—  came  to  the  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail 
and  gave  four  years  of  his  life  to  decorat- 
ing the  walls  of  the  church.  He  painted 
a  series  of  pictures  illustrating  the  human 
life  of  Christ,  and  in  a  mighty  canvas  de- 
picted the  Last  Judgment  in  such  a  manner 
as  to  attract  to  Notre  Dame  students  of 
art,  who,  as  they  study  the  picture,  forget 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  31 

the  crude  walls  that  frame  it,  forget  the 
noisy  city  with  its  whir  of  spindles  and 
clatter  of  shuttles,  finding  here  in  such  an 
unexpected  corner  of  the  world  a  work  of 
art  which  raises  their  souls  to  the  height 
of  vision.  In  the  great  church  of  Notre 
Dame  I  see  an  evidence  of  the  law  of  pro- 
gress operating  in  a  class  of  working  peo- 
ple seeking  its  end  through  culture.  That 
the  people  themselves  are  unconscious  of 
the  law  and  of  the  means  by  which  it  op- 
erates does  not  lessen  the  force  of  the  law 
nor  deny  the  means. 

We  turn  from  the  individual  and  the 
class  to  the  whole  community,  and  here  in 
no  less  striking  manner  we  see  evidences  of 
the  law  of  progress  seeking  its  end  through 
culture.  Given  a  city  of  one  hundred  and 
twenty  thousand  persons,  seven-eighths  of 
them  of  the  operative  class,  and  you  would 
little  expect  to  find  that  in  all  those  things 
that  make  for  the  higher  life  of  the  com- 
munity this  city  should  have  kept  pace,  nay. 


32  THE  CITY  OF 

even  have  outstripped,  its  progress  in  mate- 
rial things.  Yet  such  is  the  case.  The  first 
free  public  library  in  the  world  was  estab- 
lished in  Boston,  and  nine  years  later  the 
City  of  the  Dinner-Pail  followed  the  ex- 
ample of  the  Modern  Athens.  We  might 
look  for  the  first  free  public  library  in  a 
great  intellectual  centre,  but  we  should 
hardly  expect  to  find  the  second  in  a 
workaday  community.  The  impulse  that 
prompted  the  establishment  of  the  library 
in  Boston  came,  without  doubt,  from  those 
who  knew  the  blessings  of  the  intellectual 
life  and  desired  to  dedicate  a  great  public 
institution  to  the  advancement  of  learning. 
The  impulse  which  led  to  the  establishment 
of  a  similar  institution  in  the  City  of  the 
Dinner-Pail  found  its  source,  I  believe,  in 
an  aspiration  that  looked  beyond  the  fac- 
tory walls  —  the  fruit  of  the  law  of  human 
progress  at  work  among  the  toilers. 

More  natural  than  the  establishment  of 
a  public  library,  perhaps,  was  the  introduc- 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  33 

tion  of  free  text-books  in  the  public  schools 
years  before  free  text-books  were  required 
by  state  law.  In  a  community  of  wage- 
earners,  where  even  a  small  sum  spent 
for  books  would  be  a  burden  to  the  indi- 
vidual, it  was  natural  that  the  municipality 
should  be  called  upon  to  bear  the  burden; 
yet  at  the  same  time  the  fact  that  the  com- 
munity anticipated  the  law  is  an  evidence 
of  its  faith  in  the  value  of  education,  its 
effort  to  combat  anarchy  with  culture. 
More  natural  still,  but  nevertheless  an  evi- 
dence of  the  aspiration  of  its  citizens,  is  the 
fact  that  before  the  law  of  the  state  required 
manual  training  to  be  taught  in  the  high 
schools  of  all  cities  of  twenty-five  thousand 
inhabitants  and  over,  such  a  course  was 
made  a  part  of  the  school  curriculum  in  the 
City  of  the  Dinner-Pail,  while  the  same 
community  was  among  the  first  to  establish 
a  free  kindergarten  and  a  public  training- 
school  for  teachers. 

It  may  be  said  that  all  these  evidences 


34  THE  CITY  OF 

of  a  community  alive  to  the  blessings  of 
education  were  due,  in  the  first  place,  to 
the  sagacity  of  far-seeing  individuals,  public 
servants,  themselves  educated  men  and 
actuated  by  philanthropic  zeal;  and  in  a 
measure  this  is  so ;  but  that  such  individuals 
should  be  developed  in  this  workaday  city, 
in  the  very  heart  of  Philistia,  and  daily 
touching  elbows  with  the  populace,  is  the 
best  evidence  of  that  aspiration  to  which  I 
refer ;  and  if  this  fact  were  not  enough  to 
prove  the  truth  of  the  statement,  then  the 
enthusiasm  with  which  the  toilers  take  ad- 
vantage of  these  many  opportunities  opened 
to  them  could  be  cited  as  conclusive  evi- 
dence. Had  there  been  no  free  normal 
school,  the  slasher-tender's  daughters  would 
not  have  become  teachers ;  but  it  was  not  the 
training-school  that  enabled  them  to  live 
their  lives  in  the  schoolroom  instead  of  the 
factory,  it  was  the  law  of  progress  domi- 
nating the  mother's  mind,  —  that  mother 
who  for  so  many  years  tended  eight  looms 


THE  DINNER-PAIL  35 

in  the  noisy  weave-room,  —  the  unconquer- 
able desire  in  the  mother's  heart  to  give  her 
children  better  things  than  she  had  known. 
And  again,  turning  from  the  individual  to 
the  working  people  as  a  whole,  we  find  the 
final  evidence.  It  is  no  small  thing  for  three 
thousand  operatives,  after  spending  ten  and 
one-half  hours  at  work  in  the  factories,  to 
attend  school  from  seven  o'clock  until  nine 
in  the  evening.  Yet  so  they  do,  not  only  in 
the  textile  school,  seeking  to  increase  their 
efficiency  as  operatives;  not  only  in  the 
primary  and  intermediate  schools,  seek- 
ing to  fulfill  the  educational  requirements 
of  the  state  law ;  but  in  the  evening  high 
school,  seeking  that  culture  which  is  the 
fulfillment  of  the  law  of  progress. 

In  the  introduction  to  his  "  History  of 
English  Literature"  Taine  says:  "Neither 
mythology  nor  language  exist  in  them- 
selves ;  but  only  men  who  arrange  words  and 
imagery  according  to  the  necessities  of  their 
organs  and  the  original  bent  of  their  intel- 


36  THE  DINNER-PAIL 

lects.  A  dogma  is  nothing  in  itself.  Look 
at  the  people  who  have  made  it ;  nothing 
exists  except  through  some  individual  man ; 
it  is  this  individual  w^ith  whom  we  must  be- 
come acquainted."  In  just  this  way,  there 
is  no  labor  problem  separate  from  the  men 
and  women  who  create  it.  To  understand 
the  problem  we  must  know  the  individuals, 
and  know  them  as  they  really  are  —  the 
worker  at  the  loom  and  in  his  home,  the 
employer  at  his  desk  and  in  the  world  of 
men. 


II 


THE   AVERAGE    CITIZEN  AND 
THE   LABOR  PROBLEM 


THE    AVERAGE    CITIZEN 

AND    THE    LABOR 

PROBLEM 

THE  library  shelves  groan  with  the 
weight  of  books  catalogued  under  the 
head  of  "Sociology."  Thousands  of  these 
volumes  deal  with  what  is  loosely  called 
"The  Social  Question,"  or,  what  amounts 
to  the  same  thing,  "  The  Labor  Problem." 
Some  of  the  authors  are  scholars  who  have 
thought  deeply  along  economic  lines;  some 
are  sensational  writers  who  cry  that  the  rich 
are  growing  richer  and  the  poor  are  grow- 
ing poorer,  and  nothing  but  a  revolution 
can  restore  the  balance.  There  are  also 
apologists  for  the  present  regime,  who  tell 
us  that,  all  things  considered,  the  worker 
has  no  reason  to  be  discontented;  yet  the 
worker  is  discontented,  and  the  fact  must 
be   explained.    There   is  a  trend  toward 


40     THE  AVERAGE  CITIZEN 

Socialism  in  these  days,  and  programmes  for 
municipal  ownership  are  in  the  air:  some 
reformers  would  enact  laws  to  forbid,  or  at 
least  to  limit,  the  inheritance  of  great  for- 
tunes ;  some  would  level  the  conditions  of 
rich  and  poor  by  a  system  of  graduated  tax- 
ation. A  thousand  projects  are  being  dis- 
cussed, any  one  of  which  we  may  be  called 
upon  to  sanction  at  the  polls,  yet  the  aver- 
age citizen  has  but  the  haziest  notion  of 
the  social  question  and  the  conditions  which 
create  it.  The  average  citizen  has  not  read 
the  books  upon  the  library  shelves — and 
with  reason,  as  it  seems  to  him.  The  pon- 
derous tomes  of  the  doctors  of  philosophy 
present  a  forbidding  aspect;  he  has  been 
told  that  the  volumes  written  by  young 
ladies  engaged  in  settlement  work  are  not 
always  trustworthy;  and  he  shuns  the 
writing  of  the  reformers  in  the  belief  that 
all  such  are  anarchistic.  He  has  a  notion 
that  great  fortunes  must  be  tainted;  he 
regrets  that  thousands  of  his  fellow  men  go 


AND  THE  LABOR  PROBLEM   41 

to  bed  hungry ;  and  when  strikes  and  lock- 
outs send  up  the  market  price  of  beef  and 
coal,  he  believes  there  is  a  labor  problem. 
Then  he  forms  his  opinion  of  it  from  either 
the  yellow  or  the  subsidized  press.  Poor, 
perplexed  average  citizen,  if  he  would  come 
to  the  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail,  walk  its 
streets  and  enter  its  factories,  he  would  find 
the  problem  stated  and  discover  some  prac- 
tical suggestions  toward  a  solution. 

The  writer  of  this  essay  is  not  an  econo- 
mist—  he  is  not  even  a  sociologist;  he  has, 
however,  lived  all  his  days  in  a  manufac- 
turing community;  he  has  known  and 
admired  many  persons  of  great  wealth,  and 
he  has  known  and  admired  many  persons 
who  toil  from  daylight  to  dark,  earning 
their  daily  bread  in  the  factories;  and  he 
hopes  that  certain  facts  that  he  has  learned 
from  these  persons  maybe  of  some  benefit 
to  the  average  citizen  in  his  quest  for  truth. 

Some  years  ago  a  reputable  review  pub- 
lished a  sensational  article  concerning  the 


42     THE  AVERAGE  CITIZEN 

City  of  the  Dinner-Pail,  and  the  Board  of 
Trade  selected  a  writer  to  reply  to  certain 
statements  made  in  this  article  which  did 
not  seem  to  square  with  the  truth.  It  was 
my  good  fortune  to  accompany  the  coun- 
sel for  the  defendant  in  his  tour  about  the 
city  investigating  the  charges.  The  sensa- 
tional writer  had  described  the  tenements 
in  which  the  operatives  lived,  and  selected 
for  particular  criticism  a  group  of  houses 
owned  by  a  prosperous  corporation.  Such  a 
picture  of  squalor  has  seldom  been  painted 
— evidently  the  gentleman  had  never  be- 
fore seen  a  house  without  a  bath  on  every 
floor.  These  houses  were  built  about  a  quad- 
rangle which  served  as  a  common  back 
yard,  and  while  this  back  yard  might  not  be 
all  that  Mr.  J.  Horace  McFarland  might 
desire  so  far  as  grass  and  trees  are  concerned, 
it  was  a  very  large  breathing-space,  and 
gave  each  tenant  a  right  to  more  out-of- 
doors  than  one  can  hire  for  several  thou- 
sand dollars  on  Fifth  Avenue.  In  the  centre 


AND  THE  LABOR  PROBLEM   43 

of  the  quadrangle  were  a  number  of  out- 
houses which  caused  this  diligent  student  of 
sociology  a  bad  quarter  of  an  hour,  and  he 
wrote  a  long  paragraph  about  the  fearful 
sanitary  conditions  of  the  court,  where 
outhouses  were  placed  close  to  the  bedroom 
windows.  He  failed,  however,  to  state  the 
fact  that,  while  the  small  wooden  buildings 
were  originally  intended  for  sanitary  pur- 
poses, they  were  used  at  the  time  he  wrote 
as  woodsheds,  the  tenements  having  been 
fitted  with  modern  plumbing  many  years 
before.  He  summed  up  his  case  against  the 
quadrangle  in  these  words :  "  In  the  centre 
of  all  this  filth  stands  a  pump."  Not  only 
did  the  noxious  odors  invite  diphtheria  and 
Heaven  knows  what  other  fearsome  dis- 
eases, but  the  tenants  drank  infected  water 
from  a  well  situated  in  the  courtyard!  As 
a  fact,  there  was  a  pump  in  the  yard,  but  the 
pump  was  without  a  handle,  for  the  tenants 
drank  the  same  water  with  which  the  city 
provided  their  landlord's  table. 


44     THE  AVERAGE  CITIZEN 

This  well  illustrates  the  sensational  writ- 
er's method  in  dealing  with  the  problem. 
Every  fact  stated  was  true — there  were 
outhouses  in  the  quadrangle,  and  near  by 
there  was  a  pump ;  but  while  the  facts  were 
true,  the  writer's  conclusions  were  false,  be- 
cause, while  he  told  nothing  but  the  truth, 
he  failed  to  tell  the  whole  truth. 

My  friend's  reply  was  quiet  in  tone  and 
more  scholarly  in  treatment  than  the  paper 
it  contradicted ;  but  he,  like  the  other  au- 
thor, was  a  partisan — one  held  a  brief  for 
the  workingman,  the  other  argued  his  case 
for  the  manufacturer.  The  counsel  for  the 
defendant  called  attention  to  the  large 
deposits  standing  to  the  credit  of  working- 
men  in  the  savings  banks :  a  majority  of  the 
depositors  in  several  institutions  for  savings 
were  factory  operatives,  and  this  he  cited 
as  evidence  that  the  operatives  were  well 
paid  and  thrifty.  While  I  believe  the  work- 
ers in  the  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail  are  thrifty 
and  well  paid,  I  want  to  suggest  the  danger 


AND  THE  LABOR  PROBLEM   45 

of  drawing  such  a  general  conclusion  from 
the  evidence.  Large  bank  deposits  standing 
in  the  names  of  factory  operatives  clearly 
indicate  that  a  healthy  financial  condition 
exists  among  the  workers,  but  do  not  prove 
that  the  average  worker  earns  more  than  he 
spends.  The  fact  that  many  operatives  own 
bank-books  merely  shows  that  under  exist- 
ing conditions  the  thrifty  worker  may  save 
money.  To  ascertain  the  exact  meaning  of 
the  deposits  argument  it  would  be  neces- 
sary to  know  the  aggregate  of  the  deposits 
and  the  number  of  depositors,  and  to  classify 
the  workers  as  to  the  amount  of  wages  they 
actually  earn ;  this  in  itself  would  require 
the  attention  of  one  student  for  a  consid- 
erable time.  It  is  as  unfair  to  take  the  thrifty, 
self-denying  workingman  as  the  type  as  it 
is  to  set  up  the  hungry,  depraved  wretch  as 
the  inevitable  result  of  the  factory  system ; 
for  the  workingman  is,  after  all,  merely  a 
human  being,  an  individual  distinct  and  dif- 
ferent from  every  other,  and  whether  he 


46     THE  AVERAGE  CITIZEN 

lives  in  squalor  or  in  comfort  depends,  in  a 
larger  measure  than  we  are  wont  to  think, 
upon  himself;  and  his  well-being  on  his 
obedience  to  greater  laws  than  legislatures 
can  enact. 

At  the  railway  station  one  morning  I 
met  an  army  of  immigrants  just  arrived: 
one  hundred  and  sixty  Western  Islanders, 
men,  women,  and  children  seeking  a  new 
home  on  this  continent.  Had  I  journeyed 
to  the  Azores,  outside  the  principal  ports  I 
should  have  had  difficulty  in  finding  so  great 
a  crowd  of  natives ;  yet  here,  within  a  mile 
of  my  own  hearthstone,  I  was  to  all  pur- 
poses in  Fayal.  It  was  by  no  means  the 
ragged  mob  the  sensational  writer  would 
have  painted  it,  but  a  laughing,  interested 
crowd  of  men  and  women  getting  theirfirst 
impressions  of  a  strange  country.  It  was  a 
healthy  unrest  which  sent  them  wayfaring 
—  the  hope  to  better  their  condition; 
friends  had  come  before  them  and  sent  back 
word  that  America  was  indeed  the  land  of 


AND  THE  LABOR  PROBLEM   47 

promise;  following  their  example,  these 
men  and  women  had  become  wayfarers, 
and  here  they  were,  expectant  of  a  new 
hope.  Some  will  achieve  that  hope  and 
some  will  fail,  but  the  achievement  or  the 
failure  will  rest  with  the  individual. 

The  sensational  writer  would  view  this 
company  with  dismay  —  another  regiment 
to  be  mowed  down  by  the  machine  guns 
of  capital;  the  apologist  would  point  to  their 
happy,  interested  faces  and  tell  you  the  joy 
of  their  quest,  and  how  much  better  it  is 
to  run  eight  looms  all  day  and  have  the 
evenings  to  one's  self  than  to  till  the  bar- 
ren soil  of  an  island  in  the  sea ;  and  each 
writer  would  fall  wide  of  the  mark.  Some 
among  this  company  will  be  successful, 
some  will  fail,  and  so  they  would  had  they 
remained  at  home;  some  have  increased 
their  chance  of  happiness  in  the  broader 
life  of  the  New  World,  the  others  have  in- 
creased the  penalty  of  failure ;  but  the  suc- 
cess or  failure,  the  happiness  or  discontent. 


48     THE  AVERAGE  CITIZEN 

will  rest  with  the  individual,  and  cannot  be 
created  by  act  of  legislature. 

A  lad  of  seventeen,  who  for  several  years 
had  worked  at  doffing  in  a  cotton-mill, 
obtained  a  position  as  office-boy  in  another 
manufacturing  concern.  He  was  a  keen, 
energetic  young  fellow,  and  his  employer, 
ever  in  search  of  such  boys  to  strengthen 
his  organization  when  they  should  become 
men,  took  an  unusual  interest  in  the  new- 
comer. One  morning  he  noticed  the  boy 
engaged  in  footing  up  the  columns  of  an 
old  pay-sheet.  The  task  seemed  a  useless 
one,  and  the  employer  asked  the  boy  why 
he  did  it.  The  boy  replied  that,  having  no 
other  work,  he  had  asked  the  bookkeeper 
for  the  sheet  that  he  might  verify  it,  for 
the  benefit  of  the  practice.  His  employer, 
pleased  with  the  reply,  explained  to  him 
how  eagerly  men  in  business  sought  for 
boys  of  serious  purpose,  and  commended 
the  lad  for  his  diligence.  The  boy,  hesitat- 
ing at  first,  but  encouraged  by  his  employ- 


AND  THE  LABOR  PROBLEM   49 

er*s  interest,  said,  "I  have  wanted  to  tell 
you,  sir,  for  a  long  time,  how  my  ideas  about 
rich  men  have  changed  since  I  left  the  mill. 
The  men  I  worked  with  there  were  Social- 
ists, and  they  said  rich  men  had  no  hearts. 
I  had  never  known  a  rich  man,  and  when  I 
came  here  I  was  afraid  every  time  I  made  a 
mistake  that  I  should  get  a  beating.  The 
first  time  I  was  sent  to  your  private  office 
you  spoke  kindly  to  me,  and  I  went  home 
that  night  and  told  my  mother  that  rich 
men  were  sometimes  just  as  kind  as  the 
poor." 

This  is  a  true  story,  and  what  a  fearful  con- 
dition it  illustrates — a  working  boy  aston- 
ished that  his  employer  could  be  kind!  The 
solution  of  the  labor  problem  lies  in  simpler 
means  than  we  imagine ;  we  fret  and  fume 
about  this  and  that  enactment  of  law,  while 
the  real  solution  lies  beyond  the  province 
of  legislatures,  but  within  the  scope  of  each 
man's  life — a  fuller  understanding  of  the 
lives  of  those  we  meet  and  talk  with  and 


50     THE  AVERAGE  CITIZEN 

pass  by  each  day.  There  exists  a  deplorable 
ignorance  on  the  part  of  the  smug  and  com- 
fortable concerning  the  lives  of  those  who 
toil,  and  a  similar  ignorance  obtains  among 
the  workers  concerning  those  who  employ 
them. 

When  I  was  a  boy  playing  about  my 
father's  machine-shop,  I  watched  a  man 
boring  castings,  and  to-day  I  saw  the  same 
man  working  on  the  same  machine,  and 
still  boring  holes.  What  a  text  this  might 
give  the  pessimist  for  his  sermon :  how  he 
would  picture  the  despair  of  this  man's  life, 
and  what  an  arraignment  he  would  make  of 
the  factorysystem !  Yet  if  he  knew  the  man 
as  I  have  come  to  know  him,  he  would  find 
him  to  be  just  another  mortal  on  his  certain 
journey  from  the  cradle  to  the  grave.  He 
is  a  great  gentleman  in  his  own  set,  this 
borer  of  holes,  and  in  the  past  quarter  of  a 
century  has  saved  from  his  wages  what  his 
shopmates  deem  quite  a  fortune.  He  goes 
to  church  every  Sunday  with  his  daughter. 


AND  THE  LABOR  PROBLEM    51 

a  college  girl,  in  whose  education  he  takes 
a  pardonable  pride.  He  is  a  philosopher 
withal ;  he  has  looked  out  upon  the  world, 
and  it  has  meant  something  to  him.  He 
owns  the  house  in  which  he  lives,  and  be- 
lieves that  there  should  be  a  property  quali- 
fication for  voters.  He  tells  me  that  it  is 
a  mistake  for  a  man  never  to  take  a  vaca- 
tion, and  every  year  he  goes  to  New  York 
for  a  week,  to  correct  his  perspective.  Some- 
times in  the  summer  he  goes  to  Newport 
for  a  day,  but  he  does  not  approve  of  the 
summer  capital — the  residents  live  to  no 
purpose,  they  seem  bent  on  killing  time. 
Hours  to  him  are  synonymous  with  dollars, 
and  dollars  with  the  education  of  children. 
This  workingman,  the  facts  seem  to  prove, 
is  not  the  miserable  creature  the  disciples 
of  Mr.  Ruskin  would  have  us  believe ;  and, 
although  his  horizon  is  limited,  he  has 
advanced  a  step  beyond  the  office-boy  —  he 
knows  that  his  employer  may  be  kind,  but 
he  has  not  learned  that  the  man  who  gives 


52     THE  AVERAGE  CITIZEN 

ten  thousand  dollars  to  a  hospital,  and  the 
moment  the  check  is  written  forgets  it,  is 
still  capable  of  self-sacrifice. 

Some  fifteen  years  ago  "The  Coffee 
Tavern"  was  one  of  the  most  interesting 
institutions  in  the  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail. 
Primarily  the  purpose  of  the  Tavern  was 
to  provide  a  temperance  restaurant  for 
workingmen,  and  connected  with  it  were 
rooms  for  reading  and  recreation.  Soon, 
however,  there  came  a  demand  for  some- 
thing more  than  mere  entertainment.  Over 
the  games  of  pool  and  checkers  discussions 
arose  concerning  labor  and  capital,  and  the 
men  asked  for  a  class  in  political  economy. 
Thus  an  educational  work  was  begun 
which  resulted  in  a  few  workingmen  and 
a  few  employers  of  labor  becoming  better 
acquainted. 

The  directors  of  the  Tavern,  among 
whom  were  several  large  employers  of 
labor,  met  once  a  week  about  the  round 
table  which  was  the  one  conspicuous  orna- 


AND  THE  LABOR  PROBLEM    53 

ment  of  the  directors'  room,  the  regular 
dinner  was  served,  and  the  affairs  of  the  in- 
stitution were  discussed.  Incidentally  other 
matters  were  touched  upon,  and  time  out 
of  number  the  great  problem  of  labor  and 
capital  was  talked  over,  from  two  very  dif- 
ferent points  of  view,  by  the  workingmen 
in  the  main  dining-room  and  the  directors 
seated  about  the  round  table.  After  dinner 
employer  and  employee  smoked  their  pipes 
and  played  games  together,  and  each  re- 
turned to  the  factory  with  a  higher  regard 
for  the  opinions  of  the  other. 

There  was  a  debating  club  which  met  at 
the  Tavern  on  Sunday  afternoons,  at  the 
meetings  of  which  some  speaker,  in  an 
address  limited  to  thirty  minutes,  presented 
the  subject,  after  which  a  ruler  was  passed 
from  hand  to  hand,  the  possessor  of  the 
talisman  being  allowed  five  minutes  in 
which  to  add  to  the  weight  of  the  speaker's 
argument  or  to  refute  his  thesis.  The  men 
who  debated  were  workingmen,  —  unedu- 


54     THE  AVERAGE  CITIZEN 

cated,  brutalized,  as  some  writers  would 
have  us  believe ;  yet  I  have  often  heard 
at  the  Tavern,  on  Sunday  afternoon,  de- 
bates which  would  have  done  credit  to 
many  a  state  senate. 

In  looking  over  a  file  filled  with  forgot- 
ten notes  concerning  the  labor  problem,  I 
chanced  upon  a  manuscript  written  several 
years  ago  by  one  Thomas  Evans,  who  signed 
himself  "  Justice  of  the  Peace  and  Old 
Labor  Agitator."  It  brought  to  mind  the 
figure  of  an  aged  Englishman,  —  a  native 
of  Lancashire, — rough,  unkempt,  forceful, 
but  one  whose  eyes  looked  out  with  kind- 
ness on  the  world  in  which  he  lived.  All 
about  him  he  saw  conditions  crying  for 
reform ;  he  knew  the  times  were  out  of 
joint,  and  believed  with  his  whole  heart 
that  he  had  been  born  to  set  them  right. 
Thomas  Evans  was  a  remarkable  man; 
lacking  culture,  he  had  the  mind  of  a 
scholar ;  in  the  manuscript  he  failed  to  dot 
his  /'s   and  cross  his  /'s,  but  his  reason- 


AND  THE  LABOR  PROBLEM    55 

ing  was  clear  and  his  argument  masterful. 
When  I  first  knew  him  as  a  Coffee  Tavern 
debater,  he  was  an  old  man  and  down  on 
his  luck,  as  the  saying  is,  despised  by  the 
manufacturers  for  being  a  labor  agitator, 
hated  by  the  workingmen  for  conceding 
the  fact  that  sometimes  the  capitalist  is 
not  in  error.  He  was  very  poor  in  worldly 
goods,  but  rich  in  his  love  for  men.  Later, 
some  well-meaning  gentlemen  made  it 
possible  for  him  to  spend  his  last  days  in 
a  home  for  aged  people,  but  his  stay  there 
was  brief:  he  longed  for  the  activities  of  a 
busy  world;  he  preferred  poverty  with 
doing  to  comfort  with  inaction ;  and  after 
a  few  weeks  he  left  the  Home  and  returned 
to  his  attic  and  the  crust  of  bread.  En- 
feebled by  age,  he  could  no  longer  win  even 
a  meagre  living;  he  spent  a  few  weeks  in 
the  poorhouse,  but  then  his  indomitable 
will  again  sent  him  forth  into  the  world  of 
men,  where  for  a  few  days  he  fought  his 
last  brave  battle.  One  afternoon  his  totter- 


56     THE  AVERAGE  CITIZEN 

ing  form  appeared  in  the  public  square ;  a 
group  of  idlers  gathered  about  him,  and  the 
old  agitator  made  his  last  harangue.  To  his 
hearers  it  seemed  the  incoherent  mutter- 
ings  of  a  madman ;  the  police  arrested  him, 
he  was  adjudged  insane,  and  sent  to  the 
asylum,  where  he  died.  Thomas  Evans, 
J.  P.,  was  buried  in  a  pauper's  grave,  but 
his  message  to  mankind  can  never  die ;  his 
life,  as  the  world  counts  it,  was  a  failure,  — 
he  died  in  poverty, — but  who  can  tell  what 
influences  for  the  good  of  man  he  set  in 
motion  ?  Reading  the  manuscript,  I  found 
many  familiar  passages,  bringing  to  mind 
his  talks  in  the  Sunday  afternoon  debates  at 
the  Cofl?ee  Tavern;  and  I  can  suggest  the 
nature  of  these  debates  no  better  than  by 
quoting  one  or  two  passages  from  this  essay, 
entitled  "  A  Common-Sense  Sermon  on  the 
Labor  Problem." 

"  Society,"  he  says,  "  has  the  wrong 
notion  that  statesmen  lead  public  opinion 
and  originate  reforms ;  but  this  is  merely  a 


AND  THE  LABOR  PROBLEM    S7 

political  dose  for  the  simples.  Statesmen  do 
^  not  lead  public  opinion,  they  follow  it.  Re- 
forms have  to  germinate  and  develop  among 
the  people  themselves;  statesmen  are  sim- 
ply the  instruments  to  carry  out  the  col- 
lective will  of  a  nation,  and  all  legislation 
that  anticipates  the  will  of  society  must  fail. 
Schoolmasters  must  sow  before  statesmen 
can  reap.  We  hear  miuch  said  about  con- 
sistency of  thought,  and  in  my  humble 
opinion  it  is  a  monstrous  humbug  to  call 
it  a  moral  virtue,  because  all  social  progress 
is  the  result  of  changes  of  opinion.  What 
some  people  call  consistency  of  thought, 
common  sense  tells  me  is  mental  stagna- 
tion. The  great  question  before  the  country 
to-day,  the  labor  question,  can  never  be 
settled  by  salary-grabbing  politicians.  We 
must  be  Christians  first  and  partisans  after- 
wards. Common  sense  tells  me  there  can  be 
no  political  question  which  is  not  also  a  re- 
ligious question ;  and  all  real  progress  must 
be  by  honest  legislation;  such  legislation. 


58     THE  AVERAGE  CITIZEN 

however,  will  not  come  until  the  intelligent 
and  industrious  manhood  of  this  country 
brushes  aside  the  bigotry  and  prejudice,  and 
learns  with  Tolstoy  that  we  cannot  be  saved 
separately;  we  must  be  saved  collectively." 

This  seems  rare  common  sense,  and,  com- 
ing from  a  workingman,  ought  to  set  the 
smug  and  comfortable  to  thinking.  The 
man  who  reasoned  so  clearly  was  not  a 
scholar, —  I  devoted  many  hours  to  trans- 
lating the  manuscript, — but  I  will  venture 
that  on  economic  questions  he  could  con- 
found many  a  doctor  of  philosophy. 

Let  us  look  again  at  the  manuscript.  "  In 
the  saving  grace  of  common  sense,"  he 
writes,  "  trades-unionism  is  not  a  whit  bet- 
ter off  than  the  world  of  practical  politics. 
There  aresurely  many  political  trade-union 
leaders  who  trade  in  official  salaries  when 
manhood  and  true  courage  are  the  quali- 
ties most  needed;  common  sense  plainly 
tells  me  that  all  bigots  and  tyrants  are  not 
to  be  found  among  the  employers  of  labor. 


AND  THE  LABOR  PROBLEM    59 

Sectional  trades-unions  are  not  wide  enough 
to  secure  the  greatest  good  for  the  greatest 
number,  and  I  have  suffered  often  for  daring 
to  oppose  many  movements  w^hich  had  the 
support  of  sectional  unions.  We  have  heard 
a  great  deal  about  what  trades-unions  have 
done,  but  few  labor  leaders  can  be  found 
with  manhood  and  moral  courage  to  name 
the  cruel  wrongs  to  thousands  of  helpless 
and  defenseless  fellow  men  and  women 
perpetrated  by  the  selfishness  of  labor  lead- 
ers looking  for  political  honors.'* 

This  workingman  not  only  could  think 
clearly,  but  he  could  reason  impartially,  and 
you  may  seek  in  vain  among  the  writings 
of  the  partisans  of  capital  for  a  more  sting- 
ing arraignment  of  trade-unionism  than  is 
contained  in  this  manuscript  from  the  pen 
of  the  "Old  Labor  Agitator."  Thomas 
Evans  was  not  the  only  man  among  the 
members  of  the  debating  club  whose  opin- 
ions are  worthy  of  thoughtful  considera- 
tion;   there    were    many   other   speakers 


6o     THE  AVERAGE  CITIZEN 

who,  if  they  might  be  heard  by  a  larger 
audience,  would  exert  an  influence  on  mod- 
ern thought. 

The  workingmen  and  the  employers  of 
labor  who  attended  these  debates  at  the 
Coffee  Tavern  gained  for  themselves  those 
benefits  which  an  adequate  criticism  of  the 
labor  problem  would  give  to  the  average 
citizen — a  person  mightily  interested  in 
the  question  if  he  only  knew  it.  These  men 
lived  with  the  problem,  and  their  know- 
ledge came  at  first  hand.  No  sensational 
writer  could  convince  them  that  a  revolu- 
tion was  imminent,  nor  could  any  apologist 
blind  them  to  the  evils  pertaining  to  our 
present  industrial  system. 

What  these  men  knew  the  average  citi- 
zen needs  to  know.  If  he  will  not  read  the 
books  upon  the  library  shelves,  he  may  at 
least  look  out  upon  the  busy  world  in  which 
he  lives,  and  try  to  think  for  himself  con- 
cerning this  vast  problem;  he  can  touch 
elbows  with  the  man  who  carries  the  din- 


AND  THE  LABOR  PROBLEM    6i 

ner-pail,  and  learn  that  he  is  a  man  and  not 
a  machine;  he  can  talk  with  the  man  who 
employs  labor,  and  learn  that  he  is  not  the 
inhuman  monster  the  revolutionists  would 
have  us  believe ;  then,  having  come  to  know 
the  employer  and  the  employee  as  they 
really  are,  he  can  set  about  the  task  of 
making  them  better  acquainted. 


Ill 

THE  MAN  AND  THE   MACHINE 


THE    MAN    AND    THE 
MACHINE 

IN  modern  manufacturing,  economy  is 
the  dominant  note.  The  days  before  the 
advent  of  steam  and  electricity  were  days  of 
small  volume  of  business  and  large  profits ; 
but  to-day  the  reverse  of  this  condition 
obtains,  and  we  find  that  as  a  rule  the  ever- 
increasing  volume  of  business  has  been  ac- 
companied by  an  ever-decreasing  percent- 
age of  profits.  Competition  has  reduced  the 
margin  of  profits  to  a  point  vv^here  the  cost 
of  production  must  be  kept  at  the  mini- 
mum by  every  contrivance  the  manufacturer 
may  invent. 

Labor  in  its  last  analysis  is  a  commodity, 
just  as  much  as  cotton,  and  is  subject  to  the 
unalterable  law  of  demand  and  supply ;  and 
the  manufacturers  who  in  these  days  of 


66        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

keen  competition  would  keep  their  facto- 
ries in  successful  operation,  paying  to  the 
shareholders  a  just  interest  on  their  invest- 
ments and  at  the  same  time  furnishing 
thousands  of  workers  with  the  means  of 
earning  a  livelihood,  can  pay  only  the 
market-price  for  necessary  commodities, 
whether  cotton  or  labor.  At  the  beginning 
of  the  last  century  the  workingman  and  his 
employer  were  to  all  intents  associated  in 
business;  the  terms  of  the  partnership  may 
have  been  unequal,  but  the  relationship 
between  them  was  practically  that  which 
exists  in  any  partnership.  With  the  advent 
of  the  factory  system  came  a  change,  —  the 
employer  became  essentially  a  buyer,  the 
workingman  a  seller,  of  labor. 

Now,  while  labor  is  a  commodity,  like 
cotton,  coal,  oil,  reeds,  harnesses,  or  any 
item  entering  into  the  cost  of  production, 
there  is  added  to  it  the  human  element,  and 
from  this  springs  the  problem.  In  our  age 
labor  is  not  only  the  necessity  of  the  poor. 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        67 

but  it  is  the  ideal  of  the  rich.  A  man  may 
sell  cotton  at  a  loss  and  say,  "  Never  mind ; 
to-morrow  market  conditions  will  change 
and  my  loss  may  return  to  me  as  a  profit." 
He  may  sell  coal  at  a  loss  and  look  confi- 
dently to  the  future  to  reimburse  him, — 
these  things  are  mere  material  possessions ; 
but  when  he  sells  his  labor,  that  is  quite 
another  thing ;  for  his  labor  is  his  own  life. 
That  is  what  manufacturers  buy  and  the 
multitude  of  workingmen  sell, — parts  of 
the  lives  of  men. 

How  shall  we  overcome  the  conflict  be- 
tween labor  and  capital  ?  There  is  but  one 
way,  and  that  way  lies  in  the  recognition  of 
the  common  humanity  of  the  man  who 
sells  and  the  man  who  buys  labor. 

"Here  also,"  says  Carl  Hilty,  a  Swiss 
thinker,  "  is  the  reason  why  factory  labor, 
and,  in  short,  all  mechanical  occupation  in 
which  one  does  but  a  part  of  the  work, 
gives  meagre  satisfaction,  and  why  an  arti- 
san who  completes  his  work,  or  an  agricul- 


68        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

tural  laborer,  is,  as  a  rule,  much  more  con- 
tented than  factory  operatives,  among  whom 
the  social  discontent  of  the  modern  world 
first  uttered  itself.  The  factory  workman 
sees  little  of  the  outcome  of  his  work.  It  is 
the  machine  that  works,  and  he  is  a  part  of 
it.  He  contributes  to  the  making  of  one 
little  wheel,  but  he  never  makes  a  whole 
clock,  which  might  be  to  him  his  work  of 
art  and  an  achievement  worthy  of  a  man." 

I  recognize  the  truth  which  underlies  this 
view;  I  recognize  the  aesthetic  value  of 
hand-made  things;  but  I  insist  that  indis- 
criminate condemnation  of  machinery  is 
the  child  of  an  immature  imagination. 

The  machine  is  merely  the  man  multi- 
plied many  times,  and  to  it  attaches  a  spe- 
cial dignity  because  it  increases  the  power 
of  the  man  to  accomplish  results.  Let  me 
illustrate  what  I  mean  from  the  industry 
with  which  I  am  most  familiar.  The  art  of 
making  cloth  is  essentially  the  same  in  the 
great  mills  in  the  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        69 

to-day  as  it  was  centuries  ago,  when  the 
first  textile  fabric  was  woven.  Then  the  raw 
material  was  carded,  —  that  is  to  say,  it  was 
cleaned  and  the  fibres  laid  in  a  unifiDrm  direc- 
tion by  means  of  a  comb  in  the  hand  of  the 
carder ;  thus  the  father  of  Columbus  carded 
wool;  to-day  huge  engines  perform  the 
work  of  the  comb,  but  the  carding  engine 
is  operated,  as  was  the  comb  in  the  old  days, 
by  the  human  hand,  only  the  power  of  that 
hand  is  multiplied  many  thousand  times.  In 
the  old  days  a  single  spinning-wheel  kept 
one  woman  employed  from  daylight  to  dark, 
producing  less  yarn  than  the  doflfers  now 
take  in  an  hour  from  any  one  of  the  thousand 
spindles  tended  by  a  single  worker ;  and  in 
weaving,  the  power-loom  merely  repro- 
duces the  identical  movements  of  the  hands 
which  wove  the  first  textile  fabric  before 
recorded  history  began.  The  great  steam 
engine  which  operates  the  machinery  in  the 
factory  is  perhaps  the  best  illustration  of 
this  idea.  A  double  engine  of  the  triple 


70        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

expansion  Corliss  type,  indicated  at  three 
thousand  horse-power,  is  capable  of  pro- 
ducing the  power  required  to  raise  ninety- 
nine  million  pounds  to  the  height  of  one 
foot  in  one  minute.  How  many  laborers, 
think  you,  would  be  necessary  to  accom- 
plish this  tremendous  task?  And  the  ma- 
chine itself  is  the  perfection  of  mechanical 
skill:  in  it  is  the  perfect  adaptation  of  means 
to  the  end;  it  is  the  visible  expression  of 
intellectual  as  well  as  physical  power,  for 
by  it  the  irresistible  forces  of  nature  are 
controlled  and  directed  by  the  will  of  man. 
One  step  further.  The  word  "  machine  '* 
in  its  first  meaning  is  a  contrivance,  —  a 
means;  in  its  broadest  meaning  it  is  any 
organization  by  which  a  desired  effect  is 
produced.  Thus  the  whole  factory  is  itself 
one  great  machine  which  the  manager 
operates,  as  the  weaver  operates  his  loom ; 
and  just  as  the  weaver  must  understand  his 
machine  in  all  its  parts, — the  gears,  the 
pulleys,  the  shafts,  the  cams,  —  so  must 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        71 

the  manager  understand  his  men,  who 
are  the  gears,  the  pulleys,  the  shafts,  the 
cams,  of  his  greater  machine. 

As  we  walk  through  the  factories  and 
observe  the  operatives  standing  by  their 
machines,  we  are  liable  to  confuse  the  man 
with  the  machine,  to  fail  to  make  the  dis- 
tinction between  labor  and  the  laborer, 
between  the  commodity  and  the  man  who 
sells  the  commodity. 

"  I  have  worked  on  the  same  machine 
for  twenty  years,"  once  said  the  old  slasher- 
tender,  to  whom  I  have  already  referred, 
"  until  I  have  come  to  know  the  machine 
—  and  the  machine  to  know  me."  The 
statement  is  very  suggestive,  and  the  work- 
ingman  who  made  it  had  the  imagination 
of  a  poet.  "  I  have  come  to  know  the 
machine — and  the  machine  to  know  me." 
In  a  sense  the  man  does  become  a  part  of 
the  machine  he  operates;  and  the  more 
he  becomes  a  part  of  it,  the  more  effective 
will  be  his  day's  work.  He  becomes  a  part 


72        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

of  the  machine  in  that  his  intelligence  ani- 
mates it,  in  that  he  makes  himself  the  mas- 
ter of  his  instrument. 

The  man  who  had  the  imagination  to 
make  the  statement  just  quoted  was  not 
brutalized  by  twenty  years  of  labor  oper- 
ating machinery.  I  know  this  man  in  his 
own  home,  and  I  believe  that  in  his  daily 
life  he  deserves,  as  few  of  us  do,  the  name 
of  Christian  gentleman  ;  and  his  wife,  al- 
though day  in  and  day  out  for  many  years 
she  has  tended  eight  looms  in  a  Fall  River 
cotton  mill,  deserves,  as  few  women  I  have 
had  the  honor  to  know,  the  rare  title  of  lady . 

Let  us  take  this  man  and  this  woman 
as  types  of  the  brutalized  working  people, 
and  in  their  home  seek  further  light  con- 
cerning the  problem.  The  husband  came 
to  this  country  from  Lancashire  in  early 
manhood,  being  then  by  trade,  as  he  is  now, 
a  slasher-tender.  The  wife  came  to  Amer- 
ica in  childhood,  attended  the  public  schools 
until  by  law  she  was  permitted  to  work. 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        73 

when  she  became  an  eight-loom  weaver. 
After  their  marriage  and  a  wedding  journey 
from  the  church  to  their  tenement,  they 
returned  to  their  work,  and  in  the  ten  or 
twelve  years  following,  saved  enough  from 
their  wages  to  buy  a  comfortable  home, 
costing  perhaps  three  thousand  dollars,  and 
had  in  the  savings  banks  a  balance  suffi- 
cient to  make  it  seem  to  them  that  the 
wife  might  with  prudence  leave  her  looms 
in  the  noisy  weave-room  and  devote  her 
time  to  her  home  and  the  two  daughters, 
for  whom  she  had  the  ambition  that  they 
might  receive  an  education  which  would 
remove  them  beyond  the  walls  of  a  factory. 
Her  life  of  comparative  ease  was  brief,  for 
within  two  years  another  child  was  born ; 
and  after  a  time,  fearing  that  the  added 
expense  of  bringing  up  the  newcomer 
endangered  the  fulfillment  of  her  ambition 
to  educate  her  daughters,  she  returned  to 
the  factory,  and  remained  there  until  she 
had  made  her  vision  a  reality. 


74        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

This  is  but  one  of  many  similar  instances 
which  have  come  under  my  personal  obser- 
vation. I  am  not  familiar  enough  with  the 
man  with  the  hoe  to  venture  an  opinion, 
but  as  regards  the  man  who  operates  the 
machine,  I  cannot  believe  that  he  stands 
bowed  by  the  weight  of  centuries,  or  that 
the  influence  of  the  machine  in  itself  is 
brutalizing.  There  is  much  in  the  modern 
factory  system  that  is  brutalizing,  and  re- 
forms are  necessary.  These  reforms  can 
come  only  when  the  man  who  buys  labor 
learns  that  he  who  sells  labor  is  a  human 
being  like  himself,  and  when  the  employee 
comes  to  the  realization  that  his  master  is  not 
a  monster  whose  one  thought  is  to  grind  the 
workingman  under  his  feet.  Laws  may  be 
enacted  —  should  be  enacted ;  but  before 
they  can  avail  greatly,  a  better  social  un- 
derstanding must  exist  between  the  man 
who  buys  and  the  man  who  sells  labor. 

We  have  seen  that  labor  is  a  commodity, 
just  as  any  other  necessity  which  enters  into 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        ys 

the  cost  of  production  is  a  commodity;  but 
there  is  added  to  it  the  human  element,  and 
this  makes  the  buying  of  it  the  most  diffi- 
cult task  which  confronts  the  manufacturer. 
The  manager  of  a  cotton  mill  buys  cot- 
ton, and  nobody  is  interested  except  himself 
and  the  broker  who  sells  it ;  he  buys  coal, 
and  nobody  cares  about  the  terms  of  the 
trade  except  himself  and  the  dealer  who 
sells  it;  but  when  he  buys  labor,  not  only 
does  his  trade  mean  much  to  him,  much 
to  the  few  hundred  individuals  with  whom 
he  makes  his  bargain,  but  it  means  much 
to  the  whole  army  of  the  dinner-pail,  which 
daily  answers  to  the  rollcall  in  all  the  fac- 
tories throughout  the  land. 

Let  us  now  inquire  more  specifically  into 
the  problem,  and  see  how,  outside  any  ap- 
peal to  law,  a  better  understanding  may  be 
brought  about  between  the  man  who  buys 
and  the  man  who  sells  labor.  To  this  end 
we  may  take  a  concrete  example.  There 
exists  to  my  own  knowledge  one  factory. 


76        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

which  for  half  a  century  has  exemplified 
in  its  management  the  ideal  for  which  I 
am  contending.  It  is  a  small  concern,  em- 
ploying at  the  most  not  more  than  three 
hundred  hands.  The  superintendent  knows 
each  of  his  men  personally ;  he  talks  with 
them  about  the  things  nearest  to  them,  the 
little  happenings  in  their  home  life,  which 
are  to  them  as  dear  as  are  the  joys  and  sor- 
rows which  lighten  or  make  dark  his  own 
fireside.  In  event  of  an  accident  to  any  of 
them,  the  doctor's  bills  are  paid  and  their 
places  held  for  them  until  their  recovery. 
In  the  fifty  years  of  this  corporation's  his- 
tory, it  has  been  called  upon  to  defend  in 
court  but  one  tort  case,  and  that  brought 
by  a  miserable  fellow  with  an  illustrious 
criminal  record,  who  tempted  Providence 
to  crown  it  by  perjuring  himself  to  obtain 
a  few  dollars  from  those  who  for  twenty 
years  had  befriended  him .  In  the  fifty  years 
of  the  history  of  this  corporation  there  has 
occurred  but  one  strike,  brought  about  by 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        jj 

walking  delegates  who  knew  nothing  of 
the  conditions  which  obtained  there;  and 
that  strike  lasted  but  seven  days,  when  the 
men  returned  in  a  body  under  the  condi- 
tions which  had  previously  existed. 

The  method  here  employed  may  be  called 
Utopian,  but  the  results  prove  it  to  be  prac- 
tical. At  the  same  time,  the  two  incidents 
cited  illustrate  the  difficulties  which  the 
manufacturer  encounters  in  establishing  a 
better  social  understanding  with  the  work- 
ingman.  The  man  who  sells  labor,  as  a 
rule,  misunderstands  his  employer  quite  as 
often  as  the  manufacturer  misunderstands 
him.  He  fails  to  realize  that  his  employer 
is  a  human  being,  endowed  with  an  im- 
mortal soul,  who  has  the  welfare  of  his 
employees  at  heart;  he  fears  the  Greeks 
bearing  gifts,  and  cannot  understand  that 
the  man  who  buys  labor  may  act  from  an 
altruistic  motive.  He  often  assumes  the 
same  attitude  toward  his  employer  which 
he  fancies  that  his  employer  holds  toward 


78        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

him,  and  he  makes  the  meanest,  the  most 
selfish  motives  the  basis  of  his  trade.  In  my 
personal  experience,  the  man  who  is  most 
thoroughly  hated  by  his  employees  is  the 
man  who  has  the  physical,  mental,  and 
spiritual  welfare  of  his  workingmen  most 
at  heart. 

I  can  imagine  some  will  say  that,  grant- 
ing all  I  have  claimed  for  the  corporation 
referred  to,  nevertheless  it  employs  but  a 
handful  of  men,  and  when  we  attempt  to 
apply  the  same  methods  in  a  great  corpora- 
tion, employing  thousands,  we  face  a  differ- 
ent problem.  Here  neither  the  manager, 
the  superintendent,  nor  the  overseer  can 
know  personally  each  man  in  his  employ. 
This  is  indeed  true ;  but  the  manager  can 
claim  from  all  the  men  in  his  employ  the 
same  loyalty,  the  same  devotion,  which  the 
great  general  commands  from  his  troops. 
There  is  in  the  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail  a 
man  who  employs  as  many  thousand  oper- 
atives as  the  corporation  we  have  referre4 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        79 

to  employs  hundreds ;  yet  with  him  the 
same  conditions  obtain,  and  the  explana- 
tion is  the  one  I  have  suggested, — this 
man  possesses  the  essential  qualities  of  a 
great  general. 

If  thefactorybea  small  one,  giving  work 
to  a  hundred  men,  the  manager  may  know 
each  personally ;  but  if  it  be  a  large  one,  so 
that  such  personal  acquaintance  is  imprac- 
ticable, he  may  know  them  as  a  general 
knows  his  army,  —  he  may  inspire  them, 
if  he  be  a  great  man,  with  his  own  spirit. 
But,  says  the  doubtful  one,  this  ofFscouring 
of  the  world,  these  men  akin  only  to  brutes, 
will  not  respond  to  leadership.  Said  Emer- 
son, "What  a  force  was  coiled  up  in  the 
skull  of  Napoleon !  Of  the  sixty  thousand 
men  making  his  army  at  Eylau,  it  seems 
some  thirty  thousand  were  thieves  and 
burglars.  The  men  whom  in  peaceful  com- 
munities we  hold  with  iron  at  their  legs,  in 
prisons,  under  the  muskets  of  sentinels,  — 
this  man  dealt  with  hand  to  hand,  dragged 


8o        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

them  to  their  duty,  and  won  his  victories 
by  their  bayonets."  Do  you  believe  that, 
after  the  victory,  those  thirty  thousand  men 
thought  as  thieves  and  burglars,  or  needed 
to  be  held  in  irons  ?  And  again,  bowed  as 
low  by  the  weight  of  centuries  as  the  pes- 
simist would  have  us  believe  these  men  to 
be,  still  are  they  men  capable  of  infinite 
development,  animated  with  the  mighty 
impulse  which  compels  the  race  to  rise 
from  worst  to  better,  from  better  to  best. 
The  relation  of  the  man  of  business  to 
the  thousands  in  his  employ  is  in  a  measure 
comparable  with  the  relation  which  ex- 
isted in  another  time  between  the  feudal 
lord  and  his  retainers.  The  retainers  served 
their  master  in  the  great  game  of  war ;  to- 
day the  workingman  serves  his  master  in 
the  great  game  of  business ;  but  with  this 
difference  —  loyalty  was  the  ideal  of  service 
in  the  one ;  in  hatred  does  the  other  serve. 
To  accomplish  the  highest  results  in  the 
commercial  regime,  loyalty  must  be  engen- 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        8i 

dered  in  the  soul  of  the  operative.  This 
cannot  be  accomplished  in  a  day,  it  must  be 
the  result  of  slow  but  certain  growth  based 
on  a  recognition  of  the  common  humanity 
of  the  man  who  buys  and  the  man  who  sells 
labor.  The  feudal  lord  and  his  retainers 
understood  one  another  because  they  fought 
in  the  same  cause,  faced  side  by  side  the 
same  physical  peril,  used  the  same  weapons. 
At  the  end  of  the  battle  master  and  man 
sought  the  gift  of  sleep  in  the  same  camp. 
They  were  comrades.  It  is  not  so  to-day ; 
the  master  fights  for  power,  the  man  for 
his  daily  bread ;  the  master  fights  with  his 
mind,  the  man  with  his  body;  one  sleeps 
in  restless  misery  in  his  mansion,  the  other 
sleeps  in  discontent  in  his  tenement. 

Let  us  now  take  a  purely  practical  stand- 
point and  look  at  some  of  the  facts  concern- 
ing a  great  strike  in  the  textile  world,  which 
for  five  months  prostrated  an  industry  re- 
presenting a  capitalization  of  fifty  million 
dollars,  condemned  to  idleness  twenty-seven 


82        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

thousand  operatives,  and  filled  with  misery 
and  discontent  a  city  of  one  hundred  and 
twenty  thousand  persons. 

The  strike  was  brought  on  by  a  cut- 
down  in  wages  of  twelve  and  one-half 
per  cent.  At  the  time,  the  manufacturers 
were  at  their  wits'  end  in  an  attempt  to 
operate  the  factories  without  a  loss  of  profit 
in  competition  with  Southern  mills,  which 
then  enjoyed  a  temporary  advantage  in 
cheapness  of  labor,  then,  as  now,  unorgan- 
ized. It  is  due  to  the  secretaries  of  the  tex- 
tile unions  to  say  that  they  opposed  a  strike, 
as  the  conditions  pointed  to  certain  victory 
for  the  manufacturers.  In  the  excitement 
of  the  moment,  hatred,  resentment,  preju- 
dice, prevailed,  and  the  unions  voted  to  quit 
work  unless  the  old  schedule  of  wages  was 
restored.  The  condition  was  impossible,  the 
manufacturers  justly  made  no  concession, 
and  the  long  strike  ensued. 

A  suggestive  fact  should  here  be  noted : 
the  labor  leaders  opposed  the  strike,  the 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        83 

sentiment  of  the  majority  of  workers  was 
against  resistance,  for  but  twenty-five  hun- 
dred out  of  twenty-seven  thousand  opera- 
tives voted  at  the  meetings  of  the  unions ; 
yet  a  handful  of  enthusiasts,  self-willed,  un- 
mindful of  the  common  welfare,  brought 
about  by  their  votes  a  calamity  the  evil 
results  of  which  lasted  many  years. 

The  question  may  rightly  be  asked,  how 
did  it  happen,  when  the  strike  did  not 
meet  with  the  approval  of  the  labor  leaders 
and  was  unpopular  with  the  mass  of  the 
workers,  that  it  endured  through  so  many 
rtionths  of  bitter  hardship  ?  Why  did  men 
and  women  whose  better  judgment  rebelled 
against  an  unavailing  strike  accept  its  con- 
ditions and  make  no  concerted  effort  to 
terminate  it  ?  There  are  many  reasons,  but 
the  main  motive,  I  believe,  was  an  unrea- 
soning loyalty  to  the  unions  as  embodying 
the  ideal  of  the  rights  of  the  workingman. 
The  authorities  at  Washington  may  declare 
what  we  deem  an  unrighteous  war;  but 


84        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

when  the  drum  beats  and  the  call  comes 
for  volunteers,  we  are  ready  to  offer  our  lives 
in  the  service  of  our  country,  —  the  indi- 
vidual sacrifices  himself  to  the  common 
cause.  The  strike  was  declared  by  a  small 
majority  of  votes  cast  by  twenty-five  hun- 
dred men  and  women  assembled  at  the 
meetings  of  the  unions;  yet  twenty-seven 
thousand  acquiesced  in  the  result. 

This  fact  illustrates  the  power  of  the 
unions  both  for  good  and  evil,  and  enforces 
the  value  of  that  ideal  of  loyalty  to  which  I 
have  alluded.  The  power  of  labor  unions 
rests  in  the  loyalty  not  only  of  the  mem- 
bers, but  of  all  working  people,  to  the  ideal 
which  underlies  the  unions — the  dignity 
of  labor — the  sacredness  of  the  day's  work. 
The  fact  that  every  workingman  may  not 
realize  that  he  is  loyal  to  an  ideal  does  not 
alter  the  fact — he  is  loyal,  and  his  loyalty 
underlies  his  every  act.  This  loyalty  gives 
a  power  to  the  unions  which  cannot  be  com- 
puted in  terms  of  the  commercial  world ; 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        85 

it  is  the  motive,  however,  animating  a  force 
which  the  commercial  world  must  recog- 
nize and  direct  with  judgment. 

The  power  of  unions  is  unlimited,  and 
may  be  used  to  the  physical,  mental,  and 
moral  advancement  of  the  workingman,  or 
it  maybe  directed  to  his  destruction ;  it  may 
serve  the  advancement  of  mankind,  or  it 
may  retard  the  increasing  purpose  of  the 
ages.  The' need  of  labor  unions,  as  the  need 
of  a  nation,  is  for  intelligent  leadership. 
The  power  is  there,  —  who  shall  direct  it  ? 
Steam  existed  countless  ages  before  Watts, 
electricity  before  Marconi  flashed  his  first 
message  through  miles  of  unresisting  space ; 
yet  ages  of  men  and  women  watched  the 
steam  pouring  from  countless  teapots, 
and  rubbed  amber  for  an  evening's  amuse- 
ment, before  the  master  came  to  make  these 
forces  the  willing  servants  of  mankind. 

Allow  me  to  intrude  myself  to  the  ex- 
tent of  presenting  my  personal  impressions 
of  the  great  strike,  first  explaining  my 


86        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

individual  relation  to  the  employers  and 
employees.  In  a  small  way  I  am  directly 
an  employer  of  labor, — the  machine-shops 
to  which  I  give  my  daily  attention  employ 
perhaps  three  hundred  hands;  the  cotton 
factories  in  the  management  of  which  I 
am  indirectly  associated,  several  thousand. 
From  apurely  commercial  standpoint,then, 
my  bias  should  have  been  toward  the 
welfare  of  the  manufacturers.  For  fifteen 
years,  however,  I  have  been  associated  with 
St.  John's  parish,  composed  of  Lancashire 
working  people  and  their  American  chil- 
dren. My  association  with  them  has  been 
as  intimate  as  my  association  with  the  man- 
ufacturers ;  perhaps  more  intimate,  because 
the  less  highly  organized  the  social  devel- 
opment, the  greater  the  possibility  of  inti- 
mate relations.  I  have  had  the  honor  of 
officiating  as  best  man  at  the  wedding  of  an 
employee,  of  serving,  in  the  absence  of  a 
clergyman,  at  the  burial  of  a  workingman's 
child,  of  holding  the  hand  of  a  laborer  in 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        87 

his  last  hour  of  life ;  and  if  I  have  any  mes- 
sage relating  to  the  labor  problem,  it  is 
this, — the  values  of  life  are  relative,  and 
be  the  man  born  to  v^^ealth  or  poverty,  his 
instincts  and  emotions  are  the  same. 

The  great  strike  v^as  declared;  labor 
faced  capital  in  open  battle ;  market  con- 
ditions proclaimed  that  the  cause  of  labor 
W2LS  lost;  capital  would  suffer  greatly,  but 
in  the  end  v^ould  be  victorious  because  in 
this  instance  its  cause  was  just.  Twenty- 
seven  thousand  men  and  women  were  out 
on  a  strike ;  this  number  included  the  peo- 
ple of  all  nations,  —  English  and  French, 
Irish,  Portuguese,  Italians,  Poles,  and  Jews ; 
men  and  women  whom  the  smug  and  com- 
fortable term  the  offscouring  of  Europe. 
You  might  have  expected  a  demonstration 
of  force  from  this  army ;  but  when  at  day- 
light the  engines  turned  over  in  the  deserted 
factories,andthefew  workers,  eitherwithout 
loyalty  to  an  ideal  or  possessed  with  keener 
vision   than   their  fellows,  answered  the 


88        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

summons  of  the  bells,  beyond  a  few  broken 
windows,  there  were  no  evidences  of  vio- 
lence. Later  in  the  day  the  streets  of  the 
city  presented  no  unusual  sights,  except 
that  they  were  more  crowded,  as  on  a  holi- 
day. Men  and  women,  who  under  nor- 
mal conditions  would  have  been  standing 
by  their  machines  increasing  the  wealth 
of  a  nation,  stood  gazing  into  shop  win- 
dows enjoying  a  leisure  unknown  for  years. 
Here  and  there  little  groups  gathered  about 
one  more  earnest  than  his  fellows,  who 
harangued  a  listless  audience  concerning 
the  rights  of  man.  At  nightfall  the  crowd 
dispersed,  and  a  stranger  could  have  found 
no  evidences  that  a  great  battle  was  being 
waged  in  the  city. 

In  a  few  days  mass-meetings  were  held 
in  the  theatre,  at  which  speeches  were 
made  by  men  conspicuous  in  the  labor 
movement,  urging  the  workers  to  be  true 
to  the  cause,  —  but  still  no  violence.  The 
workers  were  self-contained,  confident  of 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        89 

victory.  Only  once  was  there  an  occurrence 
suggesting  public  disorder.  This  happened 
after  weeks  of  resistance,  when  the  hard- 
ships of  the  battle  had  become  well-nigh 
unendurable.  At  the  close  of  a  mass-meet- 
ing a  weaver,  braver  than  his  fellows,  spoke 
the  truth,  his  motive  being  the  common 
good.  He  had  the  intelligence  to  under- 
stand the  situation,  the  vision  to  see  that 
the  existing  conditions  pointed  to  certain 
defeat  for  the  labor  cause;  he  had  the  cour- 
age of  his  convictions  and  spoke  his  mind. 
In  a  moment  the  meeting  was  in  an  uproar, 
and  a  mob  followed  the  man  of  convictions 
through  the  main  street.  The  man  was 
rescued  by  the  police,  and  the  crowd  dis- 
persed. The  next  day  he  returned  to  his 
looms,  and  a  few  followed  him.  To-day 
his  name  is  a  name  of  reproach  in  the  City 
of  the  Dinner-Pail ;  but  his  little  service  to 
the  cause  of  labor  will  live  always. 

While  the  workers  were  holding  mass- 
meetings,  striving  by  every  ingenuity  to 


90        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

maintain  a  lost  cause,  the  representatives 
of  capital  were  immersed  in  the  endeavor 
to  start  the  factories,  to  supplant  in  a  thou- 
sand homes  want  with  plenty,  despair  with 
hope.  They  fancied  the  workingman  to 
be  their  enemy,  they  fought  selfishly,  as  did 
their  opponents;  but  in  this  instance  they 
fought  in  the  cause  of  right.  Physical  suf- 
fering was  the  lot  of  the  laborer,  —  cold, 
hunger,  pain.  Mental  stress  was  the  lot  of 
the  manufacturer,  —  the  determined  effort 
to  achieve,  the  terror  of  defeated  hope, 
defeated  ambition.  Recognition  of  one 
fundamental  fact  would  have  relieved  in  a 
moment  all  this  bodily  suffering  and  men- 
tal stress, — the  fact  that  whatever  condi- 
tions benefit  capital  must  benefit  labor  as 
well,  and  that  any  measure  which,  adopted, 
would  be  of  lasting  benefit  to  the  one,  must 
of  necessity  be  of  permanent  advantage  to 
the  other.  The  forces  of  labor  and  the 
forces  of  capital  waged  a  fierce  battle,  yet 
their  interests  were  identical.    Each  side 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        91 

suffered  hardships,  springing  from  a  com- 
mon cause;  the  battle  fought  by  capital, 
rightly  analyzed,  was  not  against  labor,  but 
against  market  conditions,  and  the  battle 
of  labor  was  against  the  same  conditions. 
If,  instead  of  contending  with  one  another, 
these  two  forces  had  united  in  the  com- 
mon cause,  untold  suffering  might  have 
been  avoided. 

In  the  end  a  conference  was  arranged  to 
be  held  at  the  State  House,  the  governor 
of  the  commonwealth  acting  within  cer- 
tain limits  as  arbitrator.  The  governor  was 
a  manufacturer  and  a  large  employer  of 
labor,  who,  in  spite  of  the  fact,  was  elected 
to  his  high  office  by  the  enthusiastic  sup- 
port of  the  labor  vote.  He  exemplified  in 
his  relation  to  his  employees  an  ideal  pre- 
viously suggested.  He  could  not  know  per- 
sonally each  man  and  woman  in  his  employ; 
but  his  spirit  of  fair  play  animated  his 
workers  as  the  spirit  of  a  great  general  ani- 
mates his  army,  and  they  were  ready  with 


92        MAN  AND  MACHINE 

their  enthusiasm,  when  the  opportunity 
came,  to  place  him  in  a  position  of  influ- 
ence and  opportunity.  They  had  for  him 
that  loyalty  which  should  exist  on  the  part 
of  all  working  people  toward  their  em- 
ployers, and  he  inspired  their  loyalty  only 
because  his  humane  attitude  toward  them 
compelled  their  devotion. 

The  conference  was  held  in  the  State 
House,  and  the  strike  was  ended.  The 
solution  was  a  simple  matter.  The  margin 
between  the  cost  of  the  amount  of  cotton 
required  to  make  a  cut  of  cloth  and  the 
market  price  of  the  same  cut  of  cloth  under 
the  old  schedule  of  wages  was  to  be  taken 
as  a  basis,  and  wages  in  the  future  were  to 
be  computed  on  that  basis ;  a  four  per  cent 
advance,  representing  the  margin  then  ex- 
isting, was  to  be  made  at  once,  and  wages 
were  to  vary  weekly  with  the  fluctuations 
of  the  market.  No  plan  could  be  devised  of 
greater  advantage  to  the  man  who  bought 
and  the"  man  who  sold  labor  ;  both  would 


MAN  AND  MACHINE        93 

share  alike  in  the  advance  or  depression  of 
market  conditions.  A  few  days  after  the 
conference,  smoke  again  poured  from  the 
factory  chimneys,  the  whirr  of  the  spin- 
dles and  the  ceaseless  clatter  of  shuttles 
were  again  joyful  sounds  within  the  factory 
walls;  at  the  bell  hour  the  army  of  the  din- 
ner-pail again  responded  to  rollcall,  —  the 
long  strike  was  ended. 


IV 

THE    TIME-CLOCK 


THE    TIME-CLOCK 

LABOR  is  a  commodity,  just  as  is  cot- 
ton, coal,  or  any  other  material  making 
up  the  cost  of  production ;  but  there  is 
added  to  it  the  human  element,  and  out  of 
this  fact  arises  the  labor  problem.  This 
problem  includes  every  question  at  issue 
between  employer  and  employee,  whether 
it  concerns  wages,  hours  of  labor,  or  san- 
itary conditions,  and,  rightly  analyzed,  is  a 
matter  of  bargain  between  the  man  who 
buys  and  the  man  who  sells  labor.  To 
understand  the  labor  problem,  we  must 
first  know  something  of  the  factory  system 
which  is  one  source  of  the  present  social 
unrest. 

In  the  beginning  the  factory  was  the 
creation,  not  of  capital,  but  of  labor ;  not 
of  the  employer,  but  of  the  workingman. 


98  THE  TIME-CLOCK 

It  was  a  natural  growth  out  of  the  home 
system  of  manufacture,  under  which  raw 
material,  either  bought  by  the  workman 
himself  or  given  out  to  him  by  a  second 
party,  was  manufactured  into  the  finished 
product  in  the  home.  The  transition  from 
the  home  to  the  factory  system  may  be 
studied  at  first  hand  in  some  countries 
to-day.  In  Japan,  for  instance,  practically 
all  the  spinning  of  yarn  is  done  in  facto- 
ries, while  the  larger  part  of  the  cloth  is 
made  on  hand-looms  in  the  homes  of  the 
weavers.  The  first  spinning-mill  was  un- 
doubtedly built  by  some  thrifty  spinner 
who,  obtaining  more  work  than  he  could 
well  do  with  his  own  hands,  hired  a  few 
less  capable  workmen  to  assist  him ;  after- 
wards he  hired  others,  until  the  rooms  of 
his  house  were  too  small  to  contain  them 
and  the  machinery;  then  he  built  a  shed 
devoted  to  his  business,  and  this  shed  be- 
came the  first  cotton  factory  in  Japan.  Our 
own  industrial  development  has  been  sim- 


THE  TIME-CLOCK  99 

ilar,  and  the  conditions  which  we  may 
observe  to-day  in  Japan  once  existed  in 
America. 

In  the  early  days  of  the  nineteenth 
century  a  machinist's  apprentice  became  a 
journeyman,  and  received  from  his  master, 
as  was  the  custom  in  those  days,  a  new  suit 
of  clothes  and  fifty  dollars  in  money.  He 
left  the  town  in  which  he  lived,  and  sought 
employment  in  a  neighboring  village, 
where  several  cotton-mills  had  been  built. 
The  mill  in  which  he  found  work  would  be 
of  interest  to  one  familiar  with  the  great 
plants  of  to-day;  the  owners,  the  superin- 
tendent, the  workers,  were  all  New  England 
folk,  among  whom  there  was  no  social  dis- 
tinction. Tradition  says  that  the  weavers  sat 
in  rocking-chairs  beside  the  newly-invented 
power-looms,  and  that  some  brought  knit- 
ting to  the  mill  to  occupy  their  spare  time, 
while  others  cultivated  flowers  in  window- 
boxes  ;  but,  rocking-chairs  or  no,  employer 
and  employee  began  work  at  the  same  hour 


loo         THE  TIME-CLOCK 

each  morning,  returned  home  at  the  same 
hour  in  the  evening,  and  after  they  had 
"  washed  up' '  and  the  supper  dishes  were  put 
away,  spent  their  evenings  together. 

The  power-loom  seemed  a  marvel  of 
ingenuity  to  the  young  machinist;  he 
watched  the  machines  turning  out  their 
useful  product,  and  repaired  them  when 
they  failed  to  work.  Then  the  thought 
occurred  to  him  that  some  day  he  might 
build  looms  and  sell  them  to  the  cotton 
factories.  He  became  acquainted  with  an- 
other machinist,  who  had  already  made  a 
start  in  this  direction,  and  the  two  young 
men  formed  a  partnership,  built  a  small 
shop,  and  commenced  business.  They 
associated  with  them  a  few  other  machin- 
ists, and  from  bell-hour  to  bell-hour,  em- 
ployers and  employees  worked  side  by  side 
at  the  bench  and  lathe.  The  owners  of 
the  shop  and  the  men  who  worked  with 
them  were  friends  and  neighbors  who  went 
to  church  and  singing  school  together,  and 


THE  TIME-CLOCK         loi 

in  social  life  met  as  equals.  In  the  shop 
disputes  would  arise  concerning  the  hours 
of  labor  and  the  amount  of  work  which 
might  reasonably  be  expected  from  each 
man  in  his  twelve  hours  of  daily  toil,  and 
these  questions  were  quarreled  out  in  the 
evening. 

As  years  went  by  and  the  business  grew 
larger,  the  employers  ceased  to  work  at 
the  bench  and  lathe.  One  became  superin- 
tendent and  devoted  his  time  to  overseeing 
the  work  of  the  men;  the  other  became 
treasurer  and  attended  to  financial  affairs, 
keeping  the  books,  buying  the  iron,  selling 
the  machinery,  and  to  other  matters  inci- 
dent to  the  general  management ;  but  this 
change  in  occupation  did  not  alter  the  close 
personal  relation  between  them  and  the 
men  in  their  employ. 

The  shop  produced  a  great  variety  of 
work,  —  not  only  power-looms,  but  steam- 
engines,  turbine  water-wheels,  machine 
tools,  shafting,  hangers,  pulleys,  and  other 


I02         THE  TIME-CLOCK 

appliances  for  the  transmission  of  power, 
hydraulic  presses,  and,  as  is  impressively 
stated  in  an  advertisement  of  the  day,  "  ma- 
chinery generally."  Twenty  men  working 
together  in  the  little  shop  were  able  to 
produce  this  vast  array  of  mechanical  de- 
vices ;  but  each  of  these  twenty  men  was  a 
machinist  who  had  served  an  apprentice- 
ship of  from  five  to  seven  years.  The  worker 
knew  each  machine  he  operated,  and  could 
make  the  machine  with  his  own  hands; 
the  age  of  specialization  —  division  of  la- 
bor, it  is  called  in  the  factory  system  —  lay 
in  the  future. 

The  machinist's  son  became  associated 
with  him  in  business.  He  did  not  learn  the 
trade,  for  by  this  time  ability  in  finance 
was  as  essential  to  the  success  of  the  con- 
cern as  mechanical  skill;  and  the  condi- 
tions which  the  son  faced  were  more  com- 
plex than  the  conditions  the  father  knew ; 
for  the  little  machine-shop  had  become  a 
modern  manufacturing  establishment.  The 


THE  TIME-CLOCK  103 

treasurer  sat  at  his  desk  in  the  office;  the 
superintendent  had  his  desk,  and  under  him 
were  foremen  who  were  responsible  for  the 
several  departments  of  the  plant.  The  tra- 
ditions of  an  older  day  were  still  vital,  a  close 
personal  relation  existed  between  employer 
and  employee;  but  the  organization  was 
more  complex  and  the  possibility  of  mis- 
understanding proportionately  increased. 
Moreover,industrial  conditions  were  chang- 
ing, competition  was  becoming  keen,  the 
era  of  small  profits  and  large  volume  of 
business  was  commencing. 

In  the  later  days  of  the  century  a  grand- 
son of  the  machinist  sat  at  the  treasurer's 
desk.  His  task  would  have  been  unimagin- 
able to  the  machinist:  there  were  letters 
to  be  dictated  to  a  stenographer,  not  writ- 
ten out  in  a  bold,  round  hand ;  there  were 
cost-sheets  to  be  examined — they  had  not 
been  so  particular  as  to  the  costs  in  the  old 
days ;  the  market  reports  had  to  be  studied 
—  there  were  no  market  reports  in  the  days 


I04         THE  TIME-CLOCK 

of  the  machinist.  The  grandfather  once 
sold  a  few  water-wheels  in  the  Southern 
States,  and  made  two  tediousjourneys,much 
of  the  way  by  stage ;  the  grandson  received 
by  mail  and  telegraph  from  the  South 
daily  inquiries  for  machinery,  and  some- 
times closed  the  bargain  by  telephone. 
Steam  and  electricity  had  annihilated  dis- 
tance; the  old  order  had  passed,  giving 
place  to  the  new;  division  of  labor  be- 
came a  necessity. 

Inside  the  factory  conditions  were  quite 
as  changed  as  in  the  office.  One  man  bored 
holes,  another  turned  studs,  each  had  his 
little  share  to  contribute  to  the  finished 
whole.  One  hundred  men,  each  making  a 
whole  machine,  might  in  a  year  build  one 
hundred  small  steam-engines ;  but  one  man 
could  bore  many  hundred  cylinders,  and  an- 
other could  turn  many  hundred  cranks ;  and 
thus  under  the  changed  conditions  a  hun- 
dred engines  could  be  built  in  the  time  for- 
merly required  to  build  one.  The  machin- 


THE  TIME-CLOCK         105 

ist  gave  seven  years  of  his  life  to  learning 
his  trade :  he  was  taught  how  to  run  a  lathe, 
standing  before  it  sometimes  fourteen  hours 
a  day ;  hand  and  eye  were  trained  by  count- 
less repetition  of  the  same  process,  until  the 
man  and  the  machine  became  one ;  mean- 
while he  had  learned  to  sharpen  tools.  In 
a  modern  shop,  tool-sharpening  is  special- 
ized :  day  in  and  day  out  men  point  bits  of 
steel ;  but  after  a  time  the  apprentice  knew 
this  trade  as  well  as  the  best  tool-sharpener. 
Specialization  has  increased  the  efficiency 
of  the  shop  as  an  organization,  but  it  has 
decreased  the  efficiency  of  the  individual 
worker  as  a  thinking  creature.  Under  the 
factory  system  the  individuality  of  the 
worker  is  lost  in  the  great  organization  of 
which  he  is  a  part ;  officially  he  has  ceased 
to  have  a  name. 

Much  of  our  industrial  discontent  arises 
from  the  time-clock,  or  rather  from  the 
thought  for  which  the  time-clock  stands. 
Wherever  the  time-clock  is  in  use,  each 


io6         THE  TIME-CLOCK 

worker  is  known  by  a  number.  He  pushes 
a  button  on  the  clock  door  when  he  com- 
mences or  quits  work,  setting  the  mechan- 
ism in  motion ;  the  gears  revolve,  a  little 
lever  falls  and  prints  in  blue  or  red  ink  the 
information  that  "207-6.59"  or  "207- 
7.01";  which  means  that  Christopher 
Cassidy,  a  citizen  of  the  United  States  of 
America  and  in  the  employ  of  the  Union 
Steel  Company,  came  to  the  factory  that 
day  at  one  minute  before  seven,  or  else  that 
he  was  one  minute  late,  for  which  offense 
the  time-keeper  is  to  dock  his  pay  a  quar- 
ter of  an  hour.  Now,  while  it  is  quite  right 
to  fine  a  man  for  being  a  minute  late  in 
getting  to  his  work,  —  if  it  has  become  a 
fixed  habit,  —  it  is  equally  wrong  to  rob 
him  of  his  name  if  the  crime  may  be 
avoided. 

To  condemn  the  use  of  the  time-clock 
would  be  absurd,  for  this  ingenious  instru- 
ment has  become  a  necessity  in  thousands 
of  factories  where  great  numbers  of  work- 


THE  TIME-CLOCK         107 

ingmen  are  employed;  and  no  toiler  can 
complain  that  the  record  it  prints  is  incor- 
rect, for  when  he  presses  the  button  he 
becomes  his  own  time-keeper;  yet  the 
relation  between  the  employer  and  the 
employee  which  the  time-clock  symbolizes 
is  wholly  bad.  This  relation  is  graphically 
set  forth  in  a  circular  I  once  read,  adver- 
tising these  machines.  "  Do  you  employ  one 
hundred  hands  ? "  it  asked;  "  do  you  realize 
what  the  loss  of  five  minutes  a  day  by  each 
man  means  to  you  in  loss  of  profits  in  one 
year?  Suppose  your  average  wage  is  two 
dollars  a  day ;  fifteen  hundred  hours  at 
twenty  cents  an  hour.  Three  hundred  dol- 
lars !  Think  of  it !  And  if  you  employ  a 
thousand  hands  your  loss  will  be  three 
thousand  dollars.   Can  you  afford  this?" 

At  first  it  would  seem  that  the  only  an- 
swer to  the  question  must  come  in  the  form 
of  an  order  for  clocks ;  but  upon  reflection 
the  employers  may  reply :  "  Possibly  I  can 
and  possibly  I  cannot.   If  I  consider  each 


io8         THE  TIME-CLOCK 

man  in  my  employ  as  a  machine  which  the 
overseer  sets  in  motion  each  morning,  as 
the  operative  starts  his  loom  by  pressing 
the  shipper-handle,  I  cannot  afford  it.  But 
if  I  look  upon  the  worker  as  a  man  capa- 
ble of  infinite  growth,  then  the  three  hun- 
dred or  three  thousand  dollars  may  be  as 
nothing  in  my  cost  of  manufacturing.  The 
day  does  not  begin  at  any  given  moment. 
A  man  may  press  his  button  on  the  time- 
clock  promptly  at  seven  every  morning 
in  the  year,  yet  the  same  man  may  cheat 
me  out  of  three  hundred  hours  every  twelve 
months." 

The  amount  of  work  which  each  man 
accomplishes  during  the  day  depends  upon 
other  factors  than  the  mere  hours  of  labor ; 
and  the  most  important  of  these  factors  is 
the  spirit  in  which  the  work  is  done.  And 
the  spirit  of  the  day's  work  will  depend 
upon  the  personal  relation  which  exists  be- 
tween the  office  and  the  workshop.  If  the 
employer  is  once  known  to  be  interested 


THE  TIME-CLOCK         109 

in  the  welfare  of  his  men,  they  will  be, 
more  truly  than  otherwise,  his  retainers, 
more  zealous  for  the  prosperity  of  his  busi- 
ness ;  but  if  his  relation  to  them  is  that  of  a 
task-master,  they  will  be  his  slaves,  merely, 
and  quite  capable  of  any  treachery.  The 
effort  of  the  employer  who  would  gain  the 
loyal  service  of  his  men  must  be  to  pre- 
serve in  every  way  possible  the  individu- 
ality of  the  employee,  to  emphasize  his 
manhood,  and  thus  to  increase  his  self- 
respect. 

A  friend  of  mine  employs  several  thou- 
sand hands  in  his  factories;  he  is  a  man 
who  knows  from  his  own  experience  the 
meaning  of  the  day's  toil,  for  he  worked  at 
the  trade  in  his  youth  and  belongs  to  that 
class  of  "risen  workmen"  that  Shadwell 
calls  hard  task-masters.  He,  however,  is  a 
most  humane  employer.  Understanding 
from  experience  "time-clock"  conditions, 
and  knowing  that  the  industrial  value  of 
a  man  is  increased  with  the  belief  in  the  im- 


no         THE  TIME-CLOCK 

portance  of  his  own  work,  this, employer  has 
adopted  every  means  to  develop  in  his  em- 
ployees a  sense  of  their  individuality.  This 
is  illustrated  by  the  system  of  fines  which 
is  enforced  in  each  department  of  his 
works.  The  man  who  in  a  week  makes  the 
most  imperfect  parts,  loses  a  small  percent- 
age of  his  pay,  and  his  loss  goes  as  a  prize 
to  the  man  who  makes  the  least  bad  work. 
In  the  main  office  a  chained  book  is  hung, 
and  in  it  are  recorded  the  mistakes  made  by 
the  clerks ;  no  penalty  is  exacted  for  these 
mistakes,  but  each  clerk,  by  reading  the 
record,  may  profit  by  the  errors  of  the 
others ;  and  it  has  come  to  be  considered  a 
fearful  disgrace  for  one  to  have  his  name 
entered  in  the  book,  so  vitally  does  the  plan 
appeal  to  the  individuality  of  the  employee. 
This  employer  also  knows  that  the  care  of 
the  body  is  the  first  step  toward  developing 
a  sense  of  self-respect,  and  he  has  provided 
proper  bathing  facilities  for  his  workers, 
means  for  warming  the  dinners  brought  to 


THE  TIME-CLOCK         iii 

his  factory  in  a  thousand  dinner-pails,  and 
a  playground  for  field  sports  on  Saturday 
afternoons ;  and  he  has  spent  many  thousand 
dollars  in  improving  the  sanitary  condi- 
tions of  his  plants.  But,  more  than  this,  he 
is  easily  accessible  to  his  men.  His  private 
office  is  carefully  guarded,  for  his  time  is 
too  valuable  to  be  wantonly  wasted.  I  have 
seen  a  dozen  men  sitting  outside  his  door, 
waiting  their  turn  to  be  received:  trusted 
representatives  of  great  selling  houses ;  buy- 
ers of  goods  seeking  to  establish  business 
relations  with  his  firm ;  perhaps  a  wealthy 
philanthropist  collecting  funds  for  private 
charity;  and  all  men  of  no  little  conse- 
quence as  viewed  by  the  laborer  who  dif- 
fidently enters  the  office.  But  this  same 
laborer  has  but  to  write  his  name  on  a  piece 
of  paper,  and  the  busy  man  promptly  re- 
ceives him  —  so  firmly  does  he  cling  to  that 
spirit  of  equality  which  characterized,  in  a 
marked  degree,  the  early  days  of  the  factory 
system. 


112         THE  TIME-CLOCK 

Side  by  side  with  the  industrial  develop- 
ment of  the  factory  system,  there  went  a 
"social"  development,  using  the  word  in 
its  narrow  meaning  as  referring  to  that  body 
of  the  elect  which  worships  at  the  shrine 
of  fashion.  Even  to-day  the  stratification  of 
"Society"  is  one  of  the  most  interesting 
phenomena  to  the  student  of  social  condi- 
tions in  a  manufacturing  community.  The 
factory  system  is  indeed,  as  Arthur  Shad- 
well  has  said,  "  the  history  of  workingmen 
rising  to  be  employers  " ;  and  in  the  process, 
by  the  acquisition  of  wealth  and  a  degree  of 
leisure,  there  comes  a  change  in  the  manner 
of  living.  On  the  surface  it  is  a  small  matter 
—  the  bean-supper  becomes  a  dinner-party, 
the  public  ball  a  dancing-party,  and  the 
morning  bath  supersedes  the  Saturday  night 
tubbing ;  but  to  the  student  of  social  con- 
ditions all  this  has  a  real  significance. 

The  machinist  who  founded  the  corpo- 
ration, the  development  of  which  we  have 
just  traced,  lived  simply,  as  did  the  men  in 


THE  TIME-CLOCK         113 

his  employ ;  his  wife  was  cook,  parlor-maid, 
and  seamstress,  and  it  was  owing  to  her  fru- 
gality more  than  to  any  other  factor  that  he 
was  able  to  create  an  establishment  which 
to-day  furnishes  employment  to  several 
hundred  machinists,  each  living  under  so- 
cial conditions  similar  to  those  he  knew. 
His  son  never  wore  overalls  and  jumper, 
never  worked  at  the  bench  and  lathe,  and 
he  was  given  an  education  which  made  his 
father's  associates  shake  their  heads  and 
prophesy  certain  failure  in  life  for  the  boy, 
so  great  was  their  distrust  of  "  book-learn- 
ing." The  grandson  of  the  machinist  went 
to  college,  and  his  business  failure  was  pre- 
dicted. It  would  be  difficult  for  one  unfa- 
miliar with  the  conditions  to  realize  the 
contempt  with  which  an  old-time  machin- 
ist, trained  under  the  apprentice  system, 
looks  upon  a  young  man  educated  in  a  tech- 
nical school,  or  how  firm  is  his  conviction 
that  a  college-bred  man  must  fail  hopelessly 
if  he  enters  business.   Machinists  of  this 


114         THE  TIME-CLOCK 

class  may  be  found  in  any  large  shop ;  they 
are  the  survivors  from  an  older  day,  before 
imagination  came  to  be  the  first  essential  of 
commercial  success,  and  form  the  human 
links  which  unite  the  age  of  steam  to  the 
days  of  the  stage-coach.  In  their  reminis- 
cences we  may  trace  with  authority  the 
changes  which  have  taken  place  in  the 
relation  of  employer  and  employee  with 
the  growth  of  the  factory  system. 

The  social  world  in  which  the  grandson 
lived  had,  like  the  industrial  conditions, 
become  complicated.  If  the  machinist  by 
some  unlucky  chance  put  a  steel  knife  to 
his  mouth,  he  might  still  be  invited  to  the 
next  bean-supper ;  but  should  the  grandson 
fail  to  call  either  in  person  or  by  pasteboard 
on  his  hostess  of  two  weeks  before,  his 
name  might  be  dropped  from  her  list.  This 
social  aspect  had  its  influence  in  creating  the 
labor  problem,  for  the  personal  touch  be- 
tween employer  and  employee  necessarily 
became  weaker  and  weaker  with  the  pro- 


THE  TIME-CLOCK         115 

gress  of  social  development.  Moreover,  an 
aristocracy  of  wealth  arose  in  which  the 
heartless  condescension  of  an  aristocracy  of 
blood  was  emphasized  by  a  sort  oireductio  ad 
absurdum.  It  is  no  less  a  sin  to  look  down 
upon  a  man  because  his  grandfather  did  not 
live  on  Beacon  Hill  than  to  despise  him 
because  he  earns  his  daily  bread  by  the  sweat 
of  his  brow ;  but  the  latter  sin  is  the  more 
obvious. 

I  sometimes  look  out  of  my  window 
when  the  bell  rings  from  the  schoolhouse 
across  the  street;  the  children  who  come 
up  the  hill  are  ragged,  some  of  them,  while 
some,  who  come  from  the  opposite  direc- 
tion, are  brought  in  fine  carriages  driven  by 
liveried  coachmen.  On  the  surface  they 
belong  to  different  classes,  yet  their  fathers 
are  engaged  in  the  same  business  —  the 
making  of  cotton  cloth.  It  is  true  that  their 
fathers  go  in  different  social  "  sets,'*  yet  in 
the  mill  the  labor  of  each  is  essential  to  the 
welfare  of  the  industry.    The  children. 


ii6         THE  TIME-CLOCK 

however,  are  of  the  same  "set,"  and  in  the 
democracy  of  the  schoolyard  mingle  in 
their  play,  for  as  yet  they  have  not  learned 
the  tremendous  significance  of  clothes.  The 
father  of  one  of  the  children,  who  came 
to  school  in  a  motor-car,  was  offered  a 
position  of  trust  in  a  factory,  and  his  little 
daughter,  when  she  heard  the  news,  cried, 
fearing  that  she  might  be  asked  to  carry 
his  dinner  to  him  in  a  pail.  When  the 
girl  is  grown  to  be  a  woman,  she  may  laugh 
at  this  incident,  yet  it  is  full  of  significance. 
There  are  many  families  in  every  manu- 
facturing town  which  conform  to  the 
democracy  of  the  schoolyard — men  and 
women,  who,  in  their  attitude  toward  the 
toilers,  foretell  that  better  understanding  be- 
tween the  man  who  buys  and  the  man  who 
sells  labor,  which  is  the  solution  of  the  pre- 
sent problem ;  because  they  have  not  worked 
with  their  hands,  they  are  better  able  to 
view  the  complex  life  of  the  community 
in  true  perspective ;  but  during  the  process 


THE  TIME-CLOCK         117 

of  rising  from  bench  and  lathe  to  leather- 
bottomed  chair  and  desk  telephone,  the 
workingman  is  apt  to  view  the  problem 
with  distorted  vision. 

The  history  of  the  machine  shops  which 
we  have  here  briefly  considered  is  the  his- 
tory, I  believe,  of  nearly  all  similar  manu- 
facturing companies  in  the  country,  and 
the  facts  in  the  development  of  the  factory 
system  which  we  have  observed  in  a  par- 
ticular case  are  applicable,  also,  to  other 
industries. 

In  the  history  of  the  factory  system  two 
main  factors  appear  which  have  a  direct 
bearing  on  our  modern  industrial  unrest, 
both  tending  to  minimize  the  importance 
of  the  individual  worker  and  to  create  a 
laboring  and  an  employing  class.  Division 
of  labor  is  the  first  of  these  factors  —  the 
expression  in  the  industrial  world  of  that 
specialization  which  in  scholarship  has 
replaced  the  broader  culture  of  our  fathers 
with  the  more  precise  learning  of  to-day. 


Ii8         THE  TIME-CLOCK 

and  in  the  professions  has  given  us  doctors 
of  medicine  whose  knowledge  of  anatomy 
is  confined  to  a  single  organ,  lawyers  who 
are  unable  to  address  a  jury,  and  clergymen 
who  cannot  preach  sermons.  I  am  not  argu- 
ing against  this  specialization,  —  there  is 
much  to  be  said  to  its  advantage ;  but  it  has 
a  tendency,  in  the  professions,  to  a  narrower 
culture,  and  in  the  workshop,  to  the  elim- 
ination of  the  individuality  of  the  worker. 
Division  of  labor  was  made  a  necessity 
by  the  discovery  of  the  power  of  steam  and 
electricity,  which  united  nation  with  na- 
tion, thus  creating  a  world-market.  It  was 
the  need  for  a  larger  production  which 
compelled  the  son  of  the  machinist,  quite 
unconsciously,  to  adopt  the  new  system; 
and  the  moment  he  adopted  it,  the  indi- 
viduality of  each  worker  in  his  employ 
counted  for  less.  The  loss  of  the  individu- 
ality of  the  worker  under  the  factory  system 
was,  I  believe,  the  direct  cause  of  unionism. 
The  worker  could  no  longer  approach  his 


THE  TIME-CLOCK         119 

employer  directly  as  man  to  man,  and  in 
order  to  make  himself  of  force  he  was  com- 
pelled to  combine  his  efforts  with  the  efforts 
of  others,  and  unionism  was  the  result. 

The  value  of  trade-unions  is  a  subject 
too  broad  for  our  present  discussion,  but 
that  the  movement  is  of  value  to  the  work- 
ingman  cannot  be  denied.  That  it  may 
serve  the  employer  in  his  relation  with  the 
employee,  I  believe,  is  likewise  true.  Grave 
mistakes  have  been  made  by  organized 
labor,  such  as  opposition  to  the  introduc- 
tion of  improved  machinery,  the  attempt 
to  limit  the  number  of  apprentices,  and  the 
many  abuses  in  vogue  in  union  shops ;  but 
the  movement  is  growing  in  strength,  and, 
as  it  grows,  becomes  more  conservative.  It 
is  hard  to  believe  that  less  than  a  century 
ago  any  combination  of  workingmen  was 
punishable  under  the  common  law  by  im- 
prisonment, yet  such  is  the  fact.  To-day 
not  only  is  the  right  of  combination  en- 
couraged by  law,  but  privileges  are  granted 


120        THE  TIME-CLOCK 

workingmen  to  further  the  principle  of 
collective  bargaining — a  movement  which 
seeks  to  place  the  worker  in  the  same  re- 
lation to  his  employer  as  that  which  ex- 
isted between  them  in  the  beginning  of  the 
factory  system. 

The  labor  problem  in  one  aspect  is  how 
justly  to  divide  the  profits  of  industry  be- 
tween the  man  who  buys  and  the  man  who 
sells  labor.  This  division  of  profits  must  ac- 
complish two  things  —  first,  the  employer 
must  receive  a  fair  return  on  his  invested 
capital,  and,  second,  the  employee  must 
receive  a  living  wage.  This  condition  ob- 
tained in  the  old  days  when  master  and  man 
worked  side  by  side  in  the  shop ;  and  it  is 
to-day  the  condition  by  which  a  more  equi- 
table industrial  order  may  be  established. 
Professor  Ryan  has  pointed  out  the  possi- 
bility of  a  distribution  of  profits  under 
which  every  capable  worker  may  receive 
a  living  wage;  the  method  by  which  he 
would  accomplish  this  result  —  by  act  of 


THE  TIME-CLOCK         121 

legislature  —  we  need  not  here  consider; 
but  gran  ting  the  possibility  of  a  living  wage, 
one  way  to  establish  it  is  by  collective  bar- 
gaining, based  on  the  fact  that  no  trade 
is  a  good  one,  nor  in  the  long  run  profit- 
able, unless  both  parties  to  it  are  satisfied. 
No  combination  of  employers  can  long 
conduct  an  industry  in  which  the  workers 
are  with  reason  discontented,  and  no  com- 
bination of  workers  can  continue  to  de- 
mand and  obtain  an  undeserved  share  of  the 
profits.  The  problem  involved  in  collective 
bargaining  is  the  same  problem  which 
master  and  man  faced  when  they  quarreled 
out  their  differences  as  they  worked  side 
by  side  in  the  shop,  only  multiplied  many 
times ;  and  its  solution  lies  in  the  same  fair- 
ness and  mutual  respect  which,  in  an  earlier 
day,  restored  harmony  between  two  antag- 
onistic shopmates — the  parties  to  an  indi- 
vidual bargain. 


V 


TRADE-UNIONISM  AND  THE 
INDIVIDUAL  WORKER 


TRADE-UNIONISM    AND 

THE    INDIVIDUAL 

WORKER 

AS  we  walk  the  streets  of  the  City  of 
the  Dinner-Pail,  enter  its  factories, 
and  visit  the  homes  of  its  people, — the 
homes  alike  of  those  who  buy  and  those 
who  sell  labor,  —  we  may  observe  in  the 
varied  life  about  us  every  phase  of  the 
labor  problem,  which,  when  viewed  in  the 
larger  field  of  the  nation,  appears  so  com- 
plicated to  the  average  citizen  that  he  de- 
spairs of  understanding  it.  If  we  were  to 
study  ever  so  casually  the  history  of  the 
great  industry  which  gives  the  city  its  dis- 
tinction, we  should  discover  the  source  of 
many  perplexing  social  questions  which  in 
America  tend  to  separate  class  from  class 


126     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

in  a  manner  singularly  at  variance  with 
the  ideals  of  the  Republic. 

In  the  early  days  of  the  last  century, 
the  wives  of  farmers  who  tilled  the  fields 
now  traversed  by  the  city  streets,  sat  be- 
fore the  spinning-wheel  and  hand-loom 
after  the  work  upon  the  farm  was  done,  and 
wove  the  cloth  from  which  their  gowns 
were  made ;  they  wove  linen,  too,  from 
flax  grown  upon  their  own  land,  and  even 
the  woolen  clothes  the  farmer  wore  were 
the  product  of  household  industry.  It  is  not 
difficult  to  imagine  the  interest  of  these 
farmer-folk  in  the  first  factory  which  was 
built  upon  the  stream;  their  refusal  to  be- 
lieve that  a  water-wheel  might  be  made  of 
sufficient  power  to  operate  so  great  a  plant 
as  that  first  factory,  which  in  size  would 
not  serve  as  an  engine-room  for  a  mod- 
ern spinning-mill;  their  wonder  as  they 
watched  the  imported  machinery,  pro- 
ducing more  yarn  in  a  day  than  a  thou- 
sand hands  might  make  on  spinning-wheels 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  127 

during  a  long  winter.  We  can  imagine, 
too,  how  eagerly  the  sons  and  daughters 
of  the  farmers  sought  work  in  the  new 
factory,  and  the  pride  they  took  in  receiv- 
ing their  wages,  paid  in  money  and  ex- 
changeable at  the  village  store  for  stylish 
foreign  fabrics  such  as  no  farmer's  wife 
could  ever  weave. 

That  successful  first  mill  was  followed 
by  another  and  another,  each  indeed  small, 
but  each  somewhat  larger  and  better 
equipped  than  those  that  went  before,  and 
all  operated  by  native  help,  with  now  and 
then  a  foreign  worker  of  Irish  or  English 
birth.  More  factories  were  built,  and  for- 
eigners came  in  great  numbers  to  operate 
the  machinery;  but  the  transition  from 
native  help  was  so  gradual  that  the  citi- 
zens did  not  realize  how  social  classes 
were  forming  in  this  democratic  com- 
munity. The  newly  built  Roman  Catho- 
lic church  gave  the  Protestants  something 
of  a  shudder,  especially  when  its  commu- 


128     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

nicants  celebrated  Christmas;  and  the  puri- 
tanical proprietors,  who  had  not  learned  to 
exchange  gifts  in  memory  of  our  Saviour's 
birth,  complained  because  the  Irish  refused 
to  work  on  the  twenty-fifth  of  December. 
Here  was  the  first  suggestion  of  conflicting 
social  ideals. 

The  immigrants,  however,  had  no  part 
in  the  event  which  made  evident  the 
growth  of  class  consciousness  in  the  City 
of  the  Dinner-Pail ;  that  occurred  in  a 
Baptist  meeting-house  and  among  Chris- 
tian folk  of  the  same  denomination.  A 
bill  had  been  introduced  in  the  state  legis- 
lature limiting  the  hours  of  factory  labor 
to  ten  a  day,  and  agitation  in  favor  of  its 
adoption  ran  high.  On  the  farm  the  day 
began  at  no  particular  hour,  nor  was  there 
any  stated  time  when  work  was  ended, 
and  a  man  was  paid  for  a  day's  labor  with- 
out regard  to  the  length  of  it.  Some,  how- 
ever, saw  a  distinction  between  farm  and 
factory  labor,  and  among  these  was  the 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  129 

minister  of  the  Baptist  church.  One  Sun- 
day at  the  hour  of  service,  the  congrega- 
tion, in  which  mill-owners  and  operatives 
sat  side  by  side,  was  thrown  into  great 
excitement  by  the  pastor,  who  preached  a 
sermon  advocating  the  ten-hour  bill;  and 
when  his  hearers  filed  out  of  the  meeting- 
house that  morning,  they  were  no  longer 
a  united  body.  The  man  who  sold  labor 
continued  to  listen  to  the  preaching  of 
the  ten-hour  parson;  but  the  man  who 
bought  labor  built  for  himself  another 
meeting-house;  and  soon  afterwards  the 
first  labor  union  was  formed.  The  same 
causes  which  for  years  had  been  at  work 
silently  to  create  discord  in  the  Baptist 
flock  had  at  the  same  time  been  in  opera- 
tion in  the  factory,  gradually  separating 
the  employer  and  employee  in  their  per- 
sonal relations,  until  at  last  it  seemed  that 
their  interests  were  no  longer  common,  and 
that  the  future  success  of  each  must  be  to 
the  disadvantage  of  the  other.  So  indus- 


I30     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

trial  warfare  took  the  place  of  mutual 
good-will,  and  more  than  half  a  century 
passed  before  the  contending  factions  be- 
gan to  see  the  folly  of  their  antagonism. 

The  development  of  unionism  was  as 
natural  as  the  development  of  the  factory 
system,  which  made  the  association  of 
workers  necessary.  So  long  as  factory- 
owners  and  factory  operatives  worked  side 
by  side  in  the  shop,  so  long  as  the  man 
who  bought  and  the  man  who  sold  labor 
belonged  to  the  same  social  class,  so  long 
as  a  close  personal  relation  existed  between 
master  and  man,  there  was  no  need  for 
organized  labor;  but  when,  in  the  compli- 
cated development  of  the  factory  system, 
the  employer,  once  associated  in  business 
with  the  employee,  found  in  the  manage- 
ment of  the  concern  his  sole  occupation, 
and  became  separated  from  the  workman 
by  a  hierarchy  of  foremen  and  overseers, 
—  the  personal  relation  between  the  buyer 
and  the  seller   of  labor   being  lost, — it 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  131 

came  about  quite  naturally  that  the  work- 
man combined  his  efforts  with  the  efforts 
of  others  of  his  class  in  order  to  command 
collectively  that  consideration  from  the 
employer  which  each  employee  had  re- 
ceived individually  in  the  earlier  stages  of 
the  factory  system.  First,  the  men  in  sep- 
arate shops  talked  over  their  common  in- 
terests in  friendly  discussions  while  at  their 
work ;  later  they  continued  these  discus- 
sions in  the  evening  at  some  appointed 
meeting-place — and  the  local  trade-union 
was  born.  With  the  growth  of  class  con- 
sciousness, local  federations  of  labor  fol- 
lowed, recognizing  the  common  interests 
of  all  hand-workers  in  the  community; 
and  these  federations  in  turn  became  united 
in  a  national  labor  movement,  in  which 
the  welfare  of  the  individual  became  sub- 
ordinated to  the  welfare  of  the  toilers  as 
a  class. 

In  administrative  principles  the  national 
labor  movement  has  shown  two  divergent 


132     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

tendencies :  the  Knights  of  Labor  sought 
to  establish  a  strong  central  body,  the  ob- 
ject being  to  unite  in  a  single  organization 
all  the  workingmen  of  the  nation,  while 
the  American  Federation  of  Labor,  subse- 
quently organized,  has  endeavored  to  keep 
all  legislative  power  in  the  hands  of  the 
several  crafts — the  Federation  being  little 
more  than  an  advisory  centre.  This  plan, 
recognizing  in  a  larger  measure  the  value 
of  the  individual,  has  been  the  more  suc- 
cessful, for  since  the  year  1886,  when  the 
Knights  of  Labor  numbered  over  seven 
hundred  thousand  members,  that  body  has 
rapidly  declined  in  numbers  and  power, 
while  the  American  Federation  has  stead- 
ily increased  in  influence,  and  to-day  pos- 
sesses all  the  machinery  necessary  to 
achieve  the  end  for  which  it  was  created ; 
namely,  to  emphasize  the  human  element 
which  is  attached  to  labor  as  a  commodity. 
How  well  adapted  to  its  purpose  this 
machinery  is,  those  who  follow  the  events 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  133 

in  the  labor-world  are  well  aware.  We 
see  how  the  demands  for  higher  wages, 
for  shorter  hours,  for  more  favorable  fac- 
tory conditions,  have  been  enforced ;  some- 
times by  actual  strike,  more  often  by  the 
mere  threat  on  the  part  of  the  unions  to 
call  out  their  members.  When  we  come 
to  study  the  history  of  labor  unions,  we 
find  that  the  part  which  the  movement 
has  played  in  the  social  progress  of  the 
toiler  is  greater  than  at  first  appears.  The 
reform  laws  passed  by  the  British  Parlia- 
ment in  the  last  century  had  their  begin- 
ning in  the  class-consciousness  which  arose 
in  the  manufacturing  cities,  following  the 
establishment  of  the  factory  system.  The 
first  of  these  acts  legalized  combinations 
of  workingmen,  and  thus  liberated  a  force 
which  was  felt  in  later  legislation,  having 
for  its  object  the  amelioration  of  the  social 
condition  of  the  toilers.  "  Mercy  by  Stat- 
ute"—  Lord  Ashley's  phrase  to  describe 
the  British  Factory  Acts,  made  law  through 


134     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

his  devoted  struggle  for  the  cause  of  labor 
—  was  due  in  no  small  measure  to  the 
rise  of  trade-unionism.  As  early  as  1833 
laws  were  passed  to  regulate  the  labor  of 
children  and  young  persons  in  the  textile 
factories  of  the  United  Kingdom;  but  it 
was  nearly  ten  years  later  before  public 
attention  was  called  to  the  pitiable  condi- 
tion of  a  class  of  juvenile  workers  which 
exceeded  tenfold  in  number  those  engaged 
in  the  textile  industries;  and  the  reason 
for  this  delay  is  to  be  found  in  the  fact 
that  bleacheries  and  print-works,  paper- 
mills,  establishments  for  the  manufacture 
of  glass  and  earthenware,  pins  and  needles, 
buttons,  and  a  hundred  like  commodities, 
were  not  conducted  on  the  great  scale  of 
the  textile  plants,  nor  were  these  industries 
confined  to  manufacturing  cities,  popu- 
lated by  men  and  women  with  common 
industrial  and  social  interests.  The  chil- 
dren thus  employed  were  neglected  longer 
than  the  others,  because  there  were  no  agi- 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  135 

tators  to  plead  their  cause,  and  no  vast  body 
of  discontented  workers  clamoring  for  the 
amelioration  of  their  social  condition. 

From  the  year  1824,  when  Parlia- 
ment repealed  the  Combination  Laws,  to 
the  Trade  Disputes  Act  in  1906,  the 
weapon  of  the  British  workingman  in  ob.- 
taining  legislative  benefits  has  been  agita- 
tion through  unionism.  The  first  labor 
agitators  in  the  City  of  the  Dinner-Pail 
were  English  operatives  of  the  same  stock 
as  the  men  who,  a  generation  before, 
lighted  the  torch  of  individual  freedom 
in  Lancashire,  and,  despised  by  the  gov- 
erning classes,  meeting  secretly  as  outlaws, 
compelled  a  reluctant  parliament  to  give 
heed  to  the  rights  of  labor,  and  in  the  end 
to  grant  schools  and  the  franchise  to  the 
children  of  toil.  While  in  America  trade- 
unionism  had  no  such  mighty  task  to  ac- 
complish, political  equality  being  already 
established,  the  conditions  of  the  factory 
system  made  the  movement  a  necessary 


136      TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

one,  and  it  would  be  idle  to  deny  the  in- 
fluence of  organized  labor  in  shaping  the 
course  of  legislative  enactment. 

Granting,  then,  that  organized  labor  is 
possessed  of  the  machinery  necessary  to  ob- 
tain its  object,  and  that  this  object  is  alto- 
gether admirable,  being  nothing  less  than 
winning  from  the  industrial  regime  a  recog- 
nition of  the  dignity  of  the  laborer  as  a 
man,  unionism  should  merit  the  unfalter- 
ing loyalty  of  every  toiler.  Many  working- 
men,  however,  and  among  them  some  of 
the  most  intelligent,  are  opposed  to  organ- 
ized labor,  and  on  the  very  ground  that  it 
detracts  something  from  the  dignity  of  the 
individual.  There  is  evidently  some  phase  of 
the  movement  which  we  have  overlooked. 

So  far  as  organized  labor  has  been  suc- 
cessful in  emphasizing  the  distinction  be- 
tween labor  and  the  laborer,  the  commodity 
and  the  man  who  sells  the  commodity,  and 
has  replaced  the  personal  relation  which 
once  existed  between  the  employer  and  the 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  137 

employee  with  an  equitable  regime  of  col- 
lective bargaining,  unionism  has  been  an 
untold  blessing  to  the  toiling  millions  —  a 
blessing  alike  to  skilled  and  unskilled  labor. 
There  is,  however,  another  side  to  the  shield. 
Unionism  came  into  being  to  emphasize  the 
dignity  of  the  laborer  as  a  man — it  resulted 
from  a  highly  organized  industrial  system, 
in  which  the  individual  played  an  insigni- 
ficant part.  Then  unionism,  in  turn,  became 
highly  organized,  so  that  to-day  its  chief 
danger  is  not  to  the  employer,  but  to  the 
employee,  and  lies  in  the  direction  of  the 
evil  which  it  was  established  to  overcome. 
The  object  of  unionism  is  to  assert  the  dig- 
nity of  the  individual  worker  as  a  man;  and 
while,  by  the  very  act  of  combination,  the 
laborer  surrenders  his  will  to  that  of  the  ma- 
jority, he  does  it  for  the  sake  of  demanding 
from  the  factory  system  a  recognition  of  his 
personality;  that  besides  being  one  little 
wheel  in  the  vast  industrial  machine,  he  may 
be  a  man  as  well. 


138      TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

Important  as  the  benefits  of  unionism 
have  been,  we  are,  nevertheless,  apt  to  over- 
emphasize them  and  to  forget  that  the 
movement  is  but  one  phase  of  the  progress 
w^hich  the  mass  of  mankind  is  still  making 
towards  the  full  consciousness  of  freedom. 
The  value  of  unionism  is  in  the  loyalty 
of  its  members,  not  to  an  organization 
merely,  but  to  the  inclusive  cause  of  labor. 
"  Loyalty,"  says  Josiah  Royce,  "  is  theWill 
to  Believe  in  something  eternal,  and  to 
express  that  belief  in  the  practical  life  of  a 
human  being."  Now,  the  cause  of  labor, 
uniting  in  itself  the  lives  of  all  the  workers, 
is  an  eternal  cause  ;  its  object  is  to  advance 
the  consciousness  of  human  freedom  among 
the  masses;  and  unionism  is  but  one  means 
by  which  loyalty  to  this  cause  may  be 
expressed.  The  moment,  therefore,  that 
unionism  demands  of  its  members  a  special 
loyalty  to  an  organization  which  exists 
only  as  a  means  of  furthering  an  eternal 
cause,  this  narrow  loyalty  becomes  a  menace 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  139 

to  every  worker  whose  name  is  not  enrolled 
upon  the  union  lists ;  when  it  entails  a  dis- 
regard for  duties  which  each  man  owes  to 
every  other  fellow  man,  unionism  ceases  to 
advance  the  cause  of  labor,  and  becomes 
instead  a  hindrance. 

That  unionism  is  often  unmindful  of  the 
inclusive  cause  of  labor  is  illustrated  by  the 
policy  of  a  minimum  wage.  The  intent  of 
this  policy  is,  of  course,  favorable  to  the 
cause  of  labor,  in  that  it  aims  to  raise  the 
standard  of  wages ;  but  in  the  present  stage  of 
our  industrial  development  the  policy  fails 
to  accomplish  this  result ;  for  a  minimum 
wage  is  usually  determined  by  the  average 
ability  of  all  the  workers  in  any  shop  adopt- 
ing the  plan,  and  the  employer,  forced  to 
pay  the  uniform  rate  to  workers  incapable 
of  earning  it,  finds  it  necessary,  in  order  that 
his  cost  of  production  shall  not  exceed  that 
of  his  competitors,  to  withhold  from  many 
superior  workmen  a  rate  of  wages  higher 
than  the  minimum,  which  otherwise  they 


I40     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

might  receive.  Thus  the  minimum  wage 
tends  to  become  a  common  wage,  the  un- 
earned increase  granted  the  incapable  work- 
ers being  paid  from  the  earnings  of  their 
more  efficient  shopmates.  The  poUcy,  there- 
fore, is  sharply  antagonistic  to  the  develop- 
ment of  efficiency  in  the  individual  worker ; 
it  stunts  his  growth  as  a  man  by  setting  a 
limit  to  his  ambition ;  it  assumes  equal  effi- 
ciency among  all  the  members  of  any  craft, 
and  by.  placing  equal  value  upon  an  hour's 
labor  without  regard  to  the  quality  of  it, 
destroys  the  reward  of  ambition. 

A  fact  too  frequently  neglected  in  con- 
sidering the  relation  of  trade-unionism  to 
the  individual  worker  is  that  there  are  dis- 
tinct classes  even  among  wage-workers. 
First,  we  have  the  vast  army  of  unskilled 
labor,  constantly  recruited  from  the  swarm 
of  immigrants  who  daily  pass  the  inspectors 
at  Ellis  Island:  wanderers  from  the  old 
world  who  have  never  learned  a  trade  come 
to  take  their  places  in  our  industrial  order 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  141 

as  common  laborers.  As  we  review  the 
army,  our  first  thought  is  one  of  fear  for  the 
permanence  of  a  state  which  so  freely  har- 
bors this  uncouth  and  unschooled  throng, 
and  we  sympathize  for  the  moment  with 
those  labor  leaders  who  look  askance  at  the 
newcomers,  seeing  in  their  presence  here 
a  degrading  influence  upon  American  labor. 
But  if  we  look  more  searchingly  into  the 
faces  of  this  eager  throng  passing  with  high 
hopes  through  the  gateway  of  the  new 
world,  our  fears  will  be  dispelled,  for  im- 
migration calls  for  courage  and  every  other 
personal  quality  which  makes  for  social 
progress  ;  they  have  left  their  old  homes 
in  quest  of  a  more  favorable  environment 
for  individual  growth ;  in  America  they  find 
that  environment,  and  thousands  of  them 
make  the  most  of  it. 

The  immigrant,  on  his  arrival  in  America 
without  a  trade,  in  most  cases  without  a 
knowledge  of  the  language  even,  frequently 
the  victim  of  unscrupulous  men  who  seek 


142     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

to  exploit  his  labor,  begins  work  at  a  dis- 
advantage and  at  a  wage  approximating  the 
meagre  income  to  which  he  was  accus- 
tomed in  the  old  world.  Many  employers 
will  say  that  to  pay  him  higher  wages  is  to 
make  him  indolent,  and  there  is  a  foundation 
for  the  statement.  At  home  his  wh  ole  life  has 
been  a  battle  for  mere  existence,  there  was 
no  margin  of  wages  to  be  saved,  and  quite 
naturally,  when  in  the  new  world  he  earns 
a  wage  sufficient  to  provide  food,  clothes, 
and  shelter,  and  have  a  penny  beside,  he 
does  not  save  this  penny  but  spends  it  to  buy 
immunity  from  toil.  After  a  time,  how- 
ever, he  becomes  acquainted  with  men  and 
women  of  his  own  race  who  are  no  longer 
strangers  in  the  new  world  ;  he  visits  them 
in  their  homes,  and  finds  that  the  floors 
are  carpeted,  that  the  children  go  to  school 
and  wear  clean  frocks,  that  the  table  is  served 
with  meat  and  fresh  vegetables  ;  then  he 
begins  to  note  a  difl^erence  between  life  in 
the  old  world  and  the  new,  and  he  desires 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  143 

the  luxuries  his  friends  enj  oy .  He  begins  to 
look  beyond  to-day,  and  becomes  ambitious 
for  the  future.  Soon  his  children  go  well 
dressed  to  school  and  return  to  a  well-kept 
home ;  the  immigrant  has  entered  the 
second  class  of  labor,  the  characteristic  of 
which  is  thrift. 

There  is  a  higher  class  of  labor,  and  one 
of  vast  importance  in  the  evolution  by 
which  the  worker  of  to-day  becomes  the 
employer  of  to-morrow :  it  consists  of  those 
who  are  not  only  ambitious  for  their  own 
success  and  the  success  of  their  children, 
but  who  look  beyond  the  pay-envelope  even, 
and  find  happiness  in  work  well  done.  A 
machinist  recently  died  in  the  City  of  the 
Dinner- Pail  who  for  nearly  half  a  century 
had  been  in  the  employ  of  one  corporation; 
year  after  year  he  worked  at  the  same  lathe 
until  its  very  ways  of  hardened  steel  were 
worn  beyond  further  service,  and  in  all  that 
time  his  interest  in  the  affairs  of  the  shop 
could  have  been  no  greater  had  he,  him- 


144     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

self,  been  sole  proprietor.  Sometimes  he 
bought  tools  with  his  own  money  to  facili- 
tate his  work,  and  he  refused  to  charge 
many  an  hour  of  overtime  because  the  labor 
had  not  been  exacted  of  him ;  he  looked 
upon  his  trade  as  a  fine  art  and  took  the 
same  joy  in  a  perfected  mechanism  that  the 
painter  takes  in  his  finished  picture.  While 
this  machinist  was,  no  doubt,  an  exception, 
there  are  many  who  work  with  the  same 
joy  of  service ;  and  when,  in  addition  to 
their  love  of  labor  and  knowledge  of  their 
trade,  they  have  executive  ability  as  well, 
these  men  leave  behind  them  the  bench 
and  lathe  and  become  themselves  employers 
of  labor. 

Because  the  workers  are  divided  into 
these  and  many  more  classes,  the  task  at- 
tempted by  unionism  to  create  an  average 
craftsman  and  then  set  its  machinery  at 
work  in  his  interest  is  not  only  a  difficult 
matter  to  accomplish,  but  is  in  result  hos- 
tile to  the  development  of  the  individual. 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  145 

It  may  be  quite  true,  as  the  Socialist  con- 
tends, that  we  should  take  even  greater 
care  to  improve  the  social  organism,  of 
which  we  are  a  part,  than  to  perfect  our 
own  individual  growth ;  and  that  the  per- 
fect development  of  each  individual  is  not 
the  highest  development  of  his  own  per- 
sonality, but  learning  to  fill,  in  the  best 
possible  way,  his  own  little  place  in  the 
social  world.  This  is  the  old  question  of 
the  one  and  the  many  which  has  given 
philosophers  in  every  field  of  thought  no 
end  of  trouble,  for  the  reason  that  neither 
ideal  is  alone  sufficient.  Like  the  citizens 
of  a  state,  the  union  workers  are  united  by 
a  common  interest  into  an  organized  com- 
munity; but  just  as,  in  the  state,  each  in- 
dividual relinquishes  only  the  right  to  do 
those  things  which  hamper  his  own  phys- 
ical and  moral  growth,  —  and  thus  the 
physical  and  moral  growth  of  the  com- 
munity, — and  relinquishes  nothing  which 
makes  for  a  higher  individual  and  conse- 


146     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

quently  a  higher  social  attainment,  so  the 
worker,  by  his  act  of  association  with  his 
fellows,  does  not  sacrifice  his  right  to  a 
well-rounded  individual  development. 

Not  long  ago  the  King  of  England 
touched  with  his  sword  the  shoulder  of  a 
working  mason,  who  knelt  before  him, 
and  said,  "Arise,  Sir  William  Grossman.'* 
A  man  was  raised  to  the  honor  of  knight- 
hood in  a  country  where  little  more  than 
a  generation  ago  his  espousal  of  the  labor 
cause  would  have  brought  him  before  the 
law  courts  on  the  charge  of  conspiracy. 
Surely  unionism  has  served  with  power 
the  progress  of  human  freedom.  It  is  pos- 
sible that  the  movement  may  still  serve, 
and  with  increasing  power,  the  progress 
of  mankind,  but  to-day  there  may  be  ob- 
served elements  of  danger  to  this  free  serv- 
ice. The  average  citizen  has  an  interest 
in  this  matter,  and  should  study  the  facts 
with  care.  The  value  of  unionism  has 
ever  consisted  in  the  emphasis  it  has  placed 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  147 

on  the  dignity  of  the  individual ;  to  pre- 
serve its  usefulness  in  advancing  the  wel- 
fare of  the  w^orkman,  unionism  must  hold 
fast  to  this  purpose. 

There  was  once  a  time  when  the  glory 
of  a  state  was  told  in  the  chronicles  of  its 
wars;  the  soldier  was  then  the  hero  and 
physical  prowess  the  measure  of  his  great- 
ness ;  the  soldier  indeed  was  king  and  the 
king  the  state.  True,  there  were  crafts- 
men in  those  days,  but  few  in  number 
compared  with  the  soldiers;  and  there 
were  husbandmen,  who  tilled  the  soil  that 
the  women  and  priests  might  not  starve, 
and  that  a  great  feast  should  be  spread 
when  the  lord  of  the  castle  rode  back  vic- 
torious from  the  wars.  But  with  the  rise 
of  democracy  the  position  of  the  crafts- 
man and  the  husbandman,  the  workers  of 
the  world,  was  vastly  changed ;  the  worker 
became  the  important  person,  while  the 
soldier  was  tolerated  only  to  protect  him 
in  his  industry.    And  the  history  of  the 


148     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

state  since  the  dawn  of  the  new  doctrine 
has  been  dominated  by  the  progress  of  the 
workingman. 

Slowly  throughout  the  centuries  the 
consciousness  of  freedom  had  been  devel- 
oping in  the  minds  of  men.  Magna  Charta, 
while  containing  many  benefits  for  the 
people,  was  in  no  sense  a  declaration  of 
freedom;  the  Barons  planted  the  seed 
merely,  seed  which  for  five  hundred  years 
slowly  matured,  until  the  industrial  revo- 
lution, which  occurred  but  a  century  ago, 
made  possible  the  ripening  of  the  fruit  in 
our  own  generation.  With  the  industrial 
revolution  came  the  factory,  and  about 
the  factory  the  city  sprang  up,  populated 
by  a  people  whose  interests  were  identical. 
Great  cities  already  existed,  but  they  were 
peopled  by  men  and  women  occupied 
with  divers  activities ;  in  the  factory  towns 
a  single  occupation  gave  a  livelihood  to 
thousands,  leading  these  thousands  to  unite 
their  efforts  for  the  advancement  of  their 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  149 

condition,  which  in  the  end  made  for  the 
progress  of  human  freedom  throughout 
the  world. 

The  advent  of  the  factory  in  England, 
however,  created,  at  first,  a  reign  of  great 
misery  among  the  workers.  Not  even  the 
galley  slaves  in  the  ancient  world  suffered 
in  mind  and  body  the  tortures  which 
were  the  daily  life  of  the  early  factory 
operatives.  In  Manchester,  when  the  ten- 
hour  law  was  first  agitated,  one  half  the 
population  sought  public  charity  in  bring- 
ing their  children  into  the  world,  and  of 
these  children  less  than  one  half  lived 
until  their  fifth  year.  The  survivors  at  the. 
age  of  seven  began  to  work  in  the  facto- 
ries, thousands  of  them  slaving  under  cruel 
taskmasters  who  used  the  lash  without 
mercy  throughout  the  fourteen  hours  of 
daily  toil ;  the  factory  became  the  plague- 
spot  of  immorality,  concerning  which  we 
have  many  a  painful  contemporary  record  : 
"Fathers  have   sworn    to    it,"    says    T^he 


I50     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

Chronicle y  "and  wished  they  had  been 
childless.**  As  we  walk  the  streets  of  the 
City  of  the  Dinner-Pail  and  mingle  with 
the  self-respecting  throng  of  quiet-man- 
nered, neatly  dressed  mill-girls,  or  enter 
its  factories  where  no  child  under  fourteen 
years  of  age  may  be  allowed  to  work;  as 
we  visit  the  homes  of  the  operatives  and 
note  in  how  great  a  measure  happiness  or 
misery  depends  upon  individual  thrift,  we 
marvel  at  the  progress  wrought  by  the 
last  century  in  the  social  condition  of  the 
workingmen. 

Just  as  the  women  spun  cotton,  wool, 
and  flax,  upon  the  farms  where  now  stand 
the  great  factories  of  the  City  of  the  Din- 
ner-Pail, so  for  centuries  before  the  inven- 
tions of  Arkwright,  the  British  craftsmen 
made  the  textile  fabrics  of  a  nation  upon 
spinning-wheels  and  hand-looms  in  their 
own  homes.  When  the  factories  were 
built,  this  vast  company  of  workers  was 
thrown  upon  the  world  without  gainful 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  151 

employment.  Some  were  taught  to  oper- 
ate the  machinery  within  the  factory 
walls,  but  thousands  were  unable  to  learn 
a  new  trade,  and  the  condition  of  these 
was  so  deplorable  that  years  afterward, 
when  the  conscience  of  the  nation  would 
no  longer  permit  half-naked  women  and 
children  to  do  the  work  of  beasts  of  bur- 
den in  the  dark  caverns  of  the  coal-mines, 
these  hand-loom  weavers  hailed  the  event 
with  joy  and  gladly  offered  themselves  for 
this  brutalizing  employment.  It  is  small 
wonder,  then,  that  the  labor  movement 
began  with  violence,  and  that  the  crafts- 
men, dispossessed  of  their  means  of  liveli- 
hood, avenged  themselves  by  breaking 
machinery  and  burning  factories. 

The  factory  hand  produced  a  hundred- 
fold more  yarn  and  cloth  than  the  crafts- 
man, and  the  cry  of  over-production 
was  heard  throughout  the  manufacturing 
world;  wages  fell  until  a  day  of  toil 
bought  but  another  day  of  greater  misery. 


152     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

and  starvation  seemed  to  be  the  gift  which 
machinery  had  brought  to  the  worker. 
Thus  the  cause  of  the  dispossessed  crafts- 
men and  that  of  the  operatives  who  took 
their  places  became  one  —  the  cause  of 
labor,  the  right  of  men  by  virtue  of  their 
human  birth  to  something  higher  than 
the  lives  of  beasts,  to  the  creation  of  a 
social  environment,  by  legislation  if  need 
be,  in  which  the  individual  might  develop 
his  own  personality.  Then,  because  it  was 
a  crime  for  workingmen  to  meet  and  dis- 
cuss the  evils  they  endured,  unionism  was 
born  in  secret  chambers,  from  which 
went  forth  the  agitators  who  became  the 
pioneers  of  industrial  freedom.  What  these 
men  accomplished  for  human  progress  is 
recorded  in  the  history  of  the  reform  par- 
liaments of  the  last  century ;  it  is  recorded, 
too,  in  the  political  history  of  every  civil- 
ized nation.  In  the  great  movement  for 
the  political  enfranchisement  of  the  masses, 
which  was  the  most   conspicuous    social 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  153 

phenomenon  of  the  last  century,  organ- 
ized labor  played  no  insignificant  part; 
and  the  fundamental  ideal  which  ani- 
mated this  movement  was  the  dignity  of 
the  individual  and  the  right  of  every  man 
to  the  fullest  possible  scope  for  the  devel- 
opment of  his  own  personality. 

Those  who  mark  the  evolution  under- 
lying our  present  civilization  are  coming 
to  believe  with  Mr.  Benjamin  Kidd,  who 
long  ago  advanced  the  theory,  that  the 
people,  having  been  admitted  to  equal 
political  rights,  are  next  to  be  admitted 
to  equal  social  opportunity.  It  may  be 
that  in  this  next  and  greater  stage  of  the 
progress  of  the  masses,  trade-unionism  is 
to  play  no  part;  that  the  narrowness  of 
its  organization,  working  in  the  interest 
of  a  select  class  of  workers,  may  prevent 
the  movement  from  further  advancing  the 
cause  of  labor.  There  is  much  in  the  pre- 
sent attitude  of  the  organization  to  give 
ground   for   this  belief,   but    those   who 


154     TRADE-UNIONISM  AND 

appreciate  the  service  of  unionism  in  the 
past  still  hope  that  its  usefulness  is  not 
outworn.  The  function  of  unionism  has 
ever  been  to  emphasize  the  human  ele- 
ment w^hich  is  attached  to  labor  as  a  com- 
modity, to  assist  in  creating  an  environ- 
ment in  which  the  individual  toiler  may 
have  free  scope  for  the  development  of 
his  own  personality.  In  the  coming  social 
evolution  some  factor  must  contribute  this 
function;  shall  that  factor  be  organized 
labor  ?  If  the  cause  of  unionism  is  made 
identical  with  the  cause  of  labor,  and  thus 
ministers  to  the  social  progress  of  every 
workingman,  we  may  believe  that  trade- 
unionism  still  has  a  work  to  accomplish; 
but  if  the  movement  is  to  minister  to  a 
class  of  workingmen  only,  its  usefulness  is 
already  at  an  end.  For  the  cause  of  labor 
is  an  eternal  cause,  in  which  the  lives  of 
all  the  wage-workers  are  united;  and  its 
object  is  to  advance  the  consciousness  of 
human    freedom    throughout  the  world. 


THE  INDIVIDUAL  WORKER  155 

Such  a  cause,  from  its  very  nature,  must 
guarantee  to  every  w^orkingman  that  full 
measure  of  individual  growth  w^hich  is 
the  priceless  gift  of  freedom.  And  this 
right  to  a  well-rounded  personal  develop- 
ment is  no  part  of  a  narrow  individual- 
ism; it  does  not  mean  that  the  individual 
shall  cease  to  make  sacrifices  for  the  wel- 
fare of  his  fellow  men,  but,  rather,  that 
the  worker,  advancing  to  a  richer  personal 
life,  shall  come  to  the  knowledge  that 
man  as  man  is  free,  and  to  a  full  conscious- 
ness of  that  freedom  which  is  perfect 
service. 


VI 
THE    CITY   OF  LUXURY 


THE    CITY    OF    LUXURY 

AFTER  a  winter  spent  in  the  City  of 
the  Dinner-Pail,  in  the  midst  of  its 
busy  life  and  in  touch  with  that  vast  army 
of  toilers  which  daily  marches  to  the  sound 
of  the  factory  bells,  I  found  myself,  when 
summer  came,  comfortably  settled  on  a  sea- 
girt farm  near  Newport.  At  first  it  was 
difficult  to  realize  that  the  scenes  about  me 
and  the  scenes  in  the  life  of  the  toiler,  to 
which  I  was  so  accustomed,  were  parts  of 
the  same  drama.  Yet  the  scenes  so  differ- 
ent are  intimately  connected,  and  there  is 
more  than  passing  significance  in  the  fact 
that  Fall  River  and  Newport  are  separated 
by  only  twenty  miles  of  railway  track. 

At  Newport  no  factory  bell  awakes  the 
sleeper  in  the  early  morning  hours ;  the  hum 
of  industry  does  not  reach  the  ear  at  noon- 


i6o     THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

day — here  is  no  camping  ground  for  the 
Army  of  the  Dinner-Pail.  No,  this  quaint 
old  city  by  the  sea  has  nothing  to  suggest 
of  wealth  in  the  making  —  it  speaks  rather 
of  wealth  accumulated,  and  by  its  splendid 
pageantry  dazzles  the  imagination  with  vis- 
ions of  America's  material  prosperity.  Here 
is  more  magnificence  than  you  may  find  in 
the  courts  of  kings  —  the  lavish  display  of 
princes  in  a  democracy  where  all  men  are 
created  equal. 

My  first  impression  of  Newport,  how- 
ever, had  nothing  to  do  with  its  lavish 
pageantry  —  it  related  rather  to  the  toil  of 
fisher-folk  and  farm-hands,  and  thus  in  the 
end  became  the  means  of  unifying  in  my 
mind  the  problems  suggested  by  the  two 
cities.  The  farm  w^as  situated  on  the  point 
which  reaches  out  toward  Brenton's  Reef, 
on  which,  some  weeks  before,  a  fishing 
steamer  had  been  wrecked.  For  several 
days  I  studied  the  stranded  vessel,  wonder- 
ing how  long  it  might  be  before  the  sea 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    i6i 

would  break  it  up,  and  if  the  ship  were 
copper-fastened,  and  if  so,  how  many 
barrels  of  driftwood  I  might  find  along 
the  beach  to  burn  in  my  study  fire  when 
the  winter  evenings  came.  But  others  had 
looked  upon  the  wreck  who  had  no  thought 
of  driftwood  fires  and  colored  flames,  but 
who  saw  anchored  there  upon  the  rocks 
a  whole  season's  fuel  for  their  homes ;  and 
these  men  set  about  to  do  themselves  what  I 
had  hoped  the  wind  and  waves  might  do  for 
me.  There  on  the  reef  lay  the  wrecked 
vessel,  to  me  a  picturesque  sight,  suggesting 
wind  and  weather  and  the  perils  of  the  sea ; 
but  to  the  farmers  and  the  fisher-folk  it 
suggested  cords  of  firewood  and  a  winter 
day's  necessity. 

Three  companies  engaged  in  reclaiming 
the  wreck :  one  of  Greek  fishermen,  whose 
huts  stand  on  the  beach  near  by,  one  of 
Portuguese  farmers,  whose  scant  acres  lie 
some  miles  to  the  north,  the  other  of  farm- 
hands  employed   on   one   of  the  nearby 


1 62     THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

estates.  The  work,  begun  in  the  afternoon 
when  the  tide  was  rising,  was  carried  on 
until  midnight.  Men  with  ropes  about 
their  bodies  swam  to  the  wreck,  and  reach- 
ing it,  hauled  great  hawsers  from  the  shore ; 
these  they  made  fast  forward,  aft,  and 
amidships.  On  shore  yokes  of  oxen  and 
teams  of  horses  strained  and  tugged  at  the 
hawsers,  wresting  from  the  sea  its  lawful 
booty,  and  at  last  hauling  the  huge  disman- 
tled craft  upon  the  nearer  rocks. 

The  ship,  being  derelict,  was  anybody's 
property,  so  the  work  was  carried  on  by 
moonlight,  lest  others  who  had  not  borne 
the  heat  and  burden  of  the  day  should  come 
by  night  and  carry  away  the  prize.  The 
Greeks  were  more  fortunate  than  the  rest, 
for  their  part  of  the  wreck  included  the 
pilot-house.  This  they,  wading  and  swim- 
ming beyond  the  surf  or  tugging  from  the 
shore,  towed  into  a  little  cove  between  two 
points  of  weather-beaten  cliffs  and  landed 
it  upon  the  beach.   In  the  pilot-house  they 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    163 

camped  for  the  night ;  but  for  the  others, 
they  must  work  while  the  moonlight  lasted 
and  afterwards  keep  vigil  until  sunrise.  A 
deal  of  labor  this  for  a  pile  of  firewood ; 
hard  labor  indeed  for  the  simplest  necessity 
of  life. 

Later  in  the  season,  within  half  a  mile 
of  the  place  where  the  wreck  was  brought 
to  the  shore,  I  witnessed  another  scene — 
a  scene  of  action  quite  as  strenuous  but  to 
a  different  purpose.  The  polo  grounds  are 
situated  on  the  same  point  where  the  ves- 
sel went  ashore.  The  green  field  lay  bright 
in  the  sunshine,  while  beyond  rolled  the 
ocean,  blue  as  the  sky  above  it.  About  the 
side-lines  great  ladies  and  gentlemen  of 
fashion  were  gathered  to  enjoy  the  game. 
Some  sat  in  finely  upholstered  carriages, 
drawn  by  magnificent  horses,  whose  golden 
harness-trappings  glittered  in  the  sunshine; 
others  sat  in  automobiles;  while  others, 
clinging  to  the  tradition  of  an  earlier  day, 
were  there  on  horseback.  On  the  piazza 


1 64    THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

of  the  clubhouse  finely  gowned  women 
and  well-groomed  men  drank  tea  while 
they  watched  swift-footed  ponies,  bearing 
their  crimson  and  yellow-clad  riders,  hel- 
ter-skelter over  the  field.  As  for  the  game, 
it  was  a  splendid  show ;  they  played  well, 
those  husky  young  fellows,  with  a  skill  and 
courage  altogether  admirable,  giving  the 
lie  to  the  notion  that  wealth  and  dissipation 
necessarily  go  hand-in-hand. 

As  I  watched  the  game,  admiring  the 
skill  of  the  players  and  realizing  the  mag- 
nificent surroundings  in  which  they  spend 
their  lives, — surroundings  permitting  in- 
finite leisure  for  the  cultivation  of  body  and 
mind,  —  the  words  quoted  by  Matthew 
Arnold,  in  his  beautiful  apostrophe  to  Ox- 
ford, came  to  my  mind.  "There  are  our 
young  Barbarians  all  at  play."  Arnold,  it 
will  be  remembered,  referred  to  the  upper, 
middle,  and  lower  classes  of  society  as  Bar- 
barians, Philistines,  and  Populace.  The 
aristocrats,    he    said,    inherited  from   the 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    165 

Barbarian  nobles,  their  early  ancestors,  that 
individualism,  that  passion  for  doing  as  one 
likes,  which  was  so  marked  a  characteris- 
tic. From  the  Barbarians,  moreover,  came 
their  love  of  field  sports,  the  care  of  the 
body,  manly  vigor,  good  looks,  and  fine 
complexions.  "The  chivalry  of  the  Bar- 
barians, with  its  characteristics  of  high 
spirit,  choice  manners,  and  distinguished 
bearing,  —  what  is  this,"  he  asks,  "but  the 
commencement  of  the  politeness  of  our 
aristocratic  class  ? "  "  There  aye  our  young 
Barbarians  all  at  play."  That  line  of  Ar- 
nold's coming  to  my  mind,  which  at  the 
moment  was  contrasting  the  scenes  I  have 
described,  suggested  the  thought  that,  de- 
spite the  familiar  words  in  the  Declaration 
of  Independence,  and  our  inherited  repug- 
nance to  the  idea,  we  have  an  upper,  mid- 
dle, and  lower  class  in  America. 

We  cannot  refer  to  our  aristocracy  by 
the  term  Barbarians,  for  its  members  are 
not  descended  from   "some  victor  in   a 


1 66    THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

Border  brawl,"  their  ancestors  being  of  the 
old-world  populace.  Yet  by  whatever  name 
it  may  be  called,  our  aristocracy  of  wealth 
possesses  characteristics  curiously  akin  to 
the  descendants  of  the  Goths  and  Huns. 

America  has  been  a  surprisingly  short 
time  in  creating  this  aristocracy  in  all  its 
refinement.  We  need  not  now  be  ashamed 
to  entertain  the  most  beribboned  prince  in 
our  summer  palaces  at  Newport ;  and  yet, 
but  little  over  fifty  years  ago,  the  author 
of  "  Lotus-Eating  "  complained  mightily 
of  the  lack  of  refinement  in  the  "  Society" 
of  that  famous  watering-place.  "A  very 
little  time  will  reveal  its  characteristic  to 
be  exaggeration.  The  intensity  which  is 
the  natural  attribute  of  a  new  race,  and 
which  finds  in  active  business  its  due  direc- 
tion and  achieves  there  its  truest  present 
success,  becomes  ludicrous  in  the  social 
sphere,  because  it  has  no  taste  and  no  sense 
of  propriety."  He  complained  that  the 
aristocracy,  being  most  successful  in  the 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    167 

acquisition  of  wealth,  knew  but  poorly 
how  to  spend  it ;  that  Croesus,  having  made 
his  money,  was  bent  on  throwing  it  away, 
so  he  built  his  house  just  like  his  neigh- 
bors'—  only  a  little  bigger  —  and  furnished 
it  with  Louis  Quinze  or  Louis  Quatorze 
deformities,  just  like  his  neighbors,  and 
bought  carriages  and  gave  dinners  and  wore 
splendid  clothes,  but  owned  few  books  or 
pictures;  he  was  mastered  by  his  means, 
and  any  other  man  with  a  large  rent-roll 
was  always  respectable  and  awful  to  him. 
"  What  is  high  society,"  asks  the  Lotus- 
Eater,  "but  the  genial  intercourse  of  the 
highest  intelligence  with  which  we  con- 
verse? It  is  the  festival  of  Wit  and  Beauty 
and  Wisdom.  ...  Its  hall  of  reunion, 
whether  Holland  House,  or  Charles  Lamb's 
parlor,  or  Schiller's  garret,  or  the  Tuileries, 
is  a  palace  of  pleasure.  Wine  and  flowers  and 
all  successes  of  Art,  delicate  dresses  stud- 
ded with  gems,  the  graceful  motion  to  pas- 
sionate and  festal  music,  are  its  ornaments 


1 68    THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

and  Arabesque  outlines.  It  is  a  tournament 
wherein  the  force  of  the  hero  is  refined 
into  the  grace  of  the  gentleman — a  masque, 
in  which  womanly  sentiment  blends  with 
manly  thought.  This  is  the  noble  idea  of 
society,  a  harmonious  play  of  the  purest 
powers."  And  in  Newport  he  finds  but  the 
form  of  it — the  promise  that  the  ideal 
may  some  day  be  realized ;  but  for  the  time 
we  must  be  content  with  the  exaggeration, 
for  "  Fine  Society  is  a  fruit  that  ripens 
slowly." 

A  generation  only  has  passed  since  the 
Lotus- Eater  wrote  his  charming  book,  and 
making  allowances  for  an  exaggeration  of 
style  quite  in  keeping  with  the  exaggera- 
tion of  the  fashionable  folk  about  whom 
he  wrote,  we  may  say  that  his  dream  of 
what  American  society  should  be  is,  in  a 
measure,  a  reality.  Here  in  Newport  is 
seen  not  only  the  form  of  a  "  Fine  Society," 
but  something  of  the  substance.  To  be  sure, 
much  of  exaggeration  remains,  but  it  is 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    169 

hardly  fair  to  call  it  characteristic ;  it  re- 
mains in  the  excesses  of  the  ultra-fashion- 
able set — the  very  new  aristocracy;  but 
back  of  this  excess,  the  description  of  which 
furnishes  many  fair  readers  with  so  much 
enjoyment  in  the  Sunday  papers,  there  is  a 
solid  foundation  of  good  manners,  bred  of 
culture,  in  which  we  may  find  that  "har- 
monious play  of  the  purest  powers  "  the 
Lotus-Eater  longed  to  see. 

This  aristocracy,  founded  on  money 
though  it  be,  early  learned  that  money  is 
but  a  means,  that  culture  is  the  end,  and 
it  soon  came  about  that  a  man  must  be  a 
pretty  insignificant  sort  of  a  millionaire, 
who  by  his  benefactions  was  unable  to 
found  a  university,  or  at  least  have  a  profes- 
sorship named  for  him,  ev^n  if  he  himself 
were  unable  to  write  English  grammatically 
—  and  the  children  of  these  millionaires 
benefited  by  their  father's  aspirations.  We 
may  not  say  by  what  marvelous  means  the 
transformation  was  effected,  but  certain  it 


I/O     THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

is,  the  Newport  of  to-day  is  very  different 
from  the  Newport  of  a  generation  ago. 
Croesus  does  not  build  his  house  just  like 
his  neighbors',  only  a  little  bigger,  but  com- 
mands the  services  of  the  ablest  architects, 
who  have  transformed  Newport  from  a  city 
of  commonplace  cottages  to  one  of  rare 
architectural  distinction.  If  Crcesus  lacks 
the  taste  to  furnish  his  house  becomingly, 
he  has  the  sense  to  hire  a  decorator  to  do 
it  for  him — although  in  a  larger  measure 
than  we  realize,  this  is  unnecessary ;  for 
Croesus  has,  in  these  later  days,  abandoned 
fast  horses  and  flashy  waistcoats,  and  has 
learned  to  buy  pictures  and  books  for  him- 
self—  and  he  enjoys  them,  too,  which  is 
even  a  greater  matter.  He  does  not  always 
spend  his  money  wisely  —  that  were  ask- 
ing too  much  in  a  single  generation;  he 
still  makes  too  great  a  show  of  his  money, 
leading  humble  folk  to  imagine  that  there 
is  some  magic  pleasure  in  the  mere  pos- 
session  of  vast    wealth.    He   will  overdo 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    171 

things  occasionally  —  or  at  least  Mrs.  Croe- 
sus will ;  as  when  once  she  built  a  tempo- 
rary ballroom  next  to  her  stately  summer 
home,  at  a  cost  —  so  the  newspapers  said 
—  of  some  forty  thousand  dollars,  and  tore 
it  down  after  a  single  evening's  entertain- 
ment. Mrs.  Croesus  will  spend  vast  sums 
of  money  to  no  rational  purpose,  and  so 
give  the  Socialists  a  deal  to  talk  about,  be- 
side creating  the  impression  that  her  hus- 
band's wealth  was  not  inherited ;  but  on  the 
whole  she  has  made  tremendous  progress 
since  she  was  a  schoolgirl. 

Yes,  despite  all  that  we  like  to  think  to 
the  contrary,  we  have  an  upper,  middle, 
and  lower  class  in  America,  but  these  classes 
are  quite  different  from  the  very  distinct 
strata  observable  in  Europe.  If  Arnold  had 
been  describing  American  society,  it  would 
have  been  difficult  for  him  to  find  a  nomen- 
clature so  readily  as  he  did  when  he  de- 
scribed the  English.  To  a  degree  the  metric 
system  has  been  adopted  in  the  division  of 


172    THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

Americans  into  classes  —  very  much  de- 
pends on  the  number  of  ciphers  to  the  left 
of  the  decimal  point.  This  is  not  to  say  that 
everywhere  in  America  a  man  is  rated  by 
the  amount  of  his  securities — that  were 
an  absurd  statement  so  long  as  the  golden 
dome  reflects  the  sunlight  over  Beacon  Hill ; 
but  from  the  very  nature  of  things  in  a  na- 
tion whose  history  is  essentially  one  of  com- 
mercial development,  any  line  between  class 
and  class  must  be  relative  to  the  success  of 
individuals  in  competing  for  the  reward  of 
commercial  supremacy;  and  this  reward  in 
the  first  instance  is  a  matter  of  dollars. 

The  history  of  society  in  America  is  the 
story  of  workingmen  rising  to  be  employers 
of  labor,  and  this  rise  is  accompanied  with 
a  constantly  changing  standard  of  living; 
children  whose  fathers  were  content  with 
rag-carpets  buy,  without  knowledge  of 
their  significance,  oriental  rugs,  and  wear 
diamond  shirt-studs.  Their  daughters  go  to 
finishing  school  and  take  on  a  fine  surface 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    173 

polishing,  their  granddaughters  go  to  col- 
lege and  learn  that  the  color  and  design 
of  the  ancestral  rug  is  what  constitutes  its 
distinction,  not  the  great  price  which  their 
successful  forebears  paid  for  it.  This  is  how 
classes  have  grown  in  America,  despite 
our  faith  in  the  gospel  according  to  Jeffer- 
son ;  and  it  is  just  this  process  which  has 
made  Newport  to-day  so  very  different 
from  the  Newport  George  William  Curtis 
wrote  about. 

I  recently  read  a  novel  written  twenty- 
five  years  ago,  describing  the  humiliations 
of  a  Western  girl,  whose  father  was  a 
wealthy  ranchman,  when  introduced  to  the 
polite  society  of  New  York.  At  table  she 
never  knew  which  fork  to  use,  and  once  she 
picked  geranium  leaves  out  of  the  finger- 
bowl  and  pinned  them  to  her  gown.  In 
the  end,  of  course,  she  learned  the  usages 
of  good  society  —  and  married  a  titled 
Englishman.  The  villain  was  a  Western 
Congressman,  who  chewed  tobacco,  and 


174     THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

shocked  but  fascinated  the  ladies  of  the 
exclusive  set.  This  antithesis  between  the 
social  development  of  the  West  and  the 
East  was  a  constant  quarry  for  the  novel- 
writer  in  the  last  generation,  and  even  now 
stories  of  this  kind  are  to  be  found  on  the 
bookstands.  The  moral  usually  is  that  real 
virtue  is  not  a  matter  of  manners  —  and  all 
good  Americans  are  pretty  much  alike 
under  the  skin.  Such  stories  illustrate  the 
fact  that  social  classes  in  America  are  more 
elastic  than  in  the  old  world,  the  one  merg- 
ing imperceptibly  into  the  other  as  indi- 
viduals rise  in  successful  competition.  In 
England  a  junk-dealer's  clerk  is  certain  to 
remain  a  clerk  until  the  end  of  his  days; 
or  if,  by  force  of  ability,  he  should  become 
a  junk-dealer,  he  will  not  change  his  social 
position  by  a  hair's  breadth.  In  America, 
if  he  has  persistency,  he  is  more  than  likely 
to  be  the  proprietor  of  a  business;  and  if 
his  success  be  great  enough,  you  may  see 
him  occupying  a  box  at  the  Newport  horse- 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    175 

show,  or  hear  of  his  wife's  brilliant  enter- 
tainments at  her  villa.  You  may  not  read 
that  Mrs.  Blank  was  among  the  guests,  — 
it  was  her  grandfather  who  dealt  in  scrap- 
iron,  and  naturally  she  is  a  bit  exclusive, 
—  but  our  junk-dealer  has  established 
himself  as  the  ancestor  of  some  future 
exclusive  Mrs.  Blank. 

There  is  a  danger  in  generalization,  and 
we  must  not  infer  that  there  is  no  part  of 
our  American  society  claiming  refinement 
as  its  heritage,  that  refinement  which  is 
inseparable  from  true  nobility  and  finds 
its  best  expression  in  simplicity  of  life  and 
character.  Such  society  we  may  find  en- 
throned in  the  finest  of  the  palaces  which 
front  the  sea  at  Newport ;  we  will  find  it, 
too,  in  some  humble  home  yonder  in  the 
City  of  the  Dinner-Pail.  Wealth  offers  no 
barrier  to  this  society  any  more  than  pov- 
erty is  its  open  sesame.  To  the  happy 
mortals  who  dwell  therein,  money  is  but 
the  means  to  make  the  world  a  happier 


176     THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

place  in  which  mankind  shall  live.  This 
man  owns  a  great  house  which  overlooks 
the  sea,  beautiful  pictures  hang  upon  its 
walls,  and  in  the  library  are  fine  books  and 
precious  manuscripts.  It  has  been  his 
pleasure  to  collect  these  masterpieces  of  lit- 
erature and  art ;  he  shares  the  joy  of  them 
with  his  friends,  he  invites  the  student  and 
the  connoisseur  to  enjoy  his  treasures  with 
him;  he  lends  his  pictures  to  the  public 
galleries  and  holds  his  manuscripts  in  trust 
for  scholars ;  and  so  his  pleasure  has  added 
to  the  public  wealth  as  surely  as  the  rail- 
roads his  industry  has  built  or  the  mines  he 
has  opened.  And  after  the  long  day's  work 
in  one  of  the  countless  factories  which 
the  genius  of  this  multi-millionaire  has 
created,  many  men  and  women  return  to 
their  quiet  homes,  there  to  enjoy  the  same 
pictures  and  books  which  enrich  his  man- 
sion— for  in  this  marvelous  age,  machin- 
ery, so  despised  by  some,  has  given  to  the 
humblest  citizen  every  means  of  culture. 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    177 

One  day  during  my  summer  on  the  sea- 
girt farm,  society  was  stirred  by  the  arri- 
val of  a  duchess  who  came  for  a  visit  to  a 
great  house  on  the  avenue.  The  next  after- 
noon many  carriages  stopped  at  the  door, 
the  footmen  leaving  cards ;  society  paid  its 
call  of  welcome.  Driving  my  quiet  rig  by 
the  house,  the  sound  of  the  horse's  feet 
upon  the  pavement  attracted  attention 
within.  The  great  doors  swung  open ;  two 
flunkeys,  dressed  in  crimson  satin  livery, 
white  silk  stockings,  golden  knee-buckles, 
and  powdered  wigs,  stood  before  me ;  one 
extended  a  golden  salver  to  receive  my  cards, 
but,  seeing  his  mistake,  retired.  Before  the 
doors  closed  behind  him,  I  glanced  into 
the  great  hall,  down  which  a  line  of  other 
flunkeys  in  similar  livery  stood  at  attention. 
Somehow  that  livery  has  remained  in  my 
memory  ever  since.  Surely,  in  the  fifty  years 
since  Mrs.  Potiphar  consulted  the  Reverend 
Mr.  Cream  Cheese  concerning  the  color 
and  cut  of  the  Potiphar  livery,  Americans 


178     THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

have  made  tremendous  strides  in  dressing 
their  servants.  It  is  not,  however,  the  ques- 
tionable right  of  Americans  to  the  apos- 
toUc  succession  of  flunkeydom  that  keeps 
the  vision  of  those  radiant  servants  in  my 
memory,  but  the  suggestion  of  luxury 
their  decorous  forms  called  up  to  a  mind 
filled,  that  afternoon,  w^ith  the  problems  of 
poverty,  and  with  speculations  concerning 
the  possibilities  of  a  distribution  of  wealth 
in  which  a  living  wage  might  be  guaran- 
teed to  every  able-bodied  man  who  is  will- 
ing to  work  for  it. 

Poverty  and  Luxury  —  these  are  the  dis- 
eases of  our  industrial  regime,  to  the  cure 
of  which  the  Socialists  offer  their  ineffec- 
tual remedy ;  ineffectual  since  the  popula- 
tion of  the  United  States  is  made  up  of 
ninety  million  individuals,  some  of  whom 
will  be  forever  on  the  verge  of  bank- 
ruptcy, however  great  their  income,  and 
some  frugal  and  always  carrying  their  ac- 
count on  the   right  side  of  the  balance 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    179 

sheet,  however  small  their  annual  allot- 
ment of  wealth. 

Poverty  and  Luxury  —  twin  diseases 
sapping  the  life  of  society :  the  one  destroy- 
ing ambition  by  withholding  sufficient 
nourishment  to  the  body;  the  other  ren- 
dering men  worthless  by  a  superabundance 
of  the  good  things  of  life.  Poverty  is  a 
disease  not  indigenous  to  our  American 
soil;  it  is  a  plague  brought  in  by  immi- 
grant ships  from  worn-out  Europe,  and 
the  patients  are  cured  here  by  the  thou- 
sands. So  long  as  there  remains  an  uncul- 
tivated acre  of  land  anywhere  in  the  Union, 
there  is  no  real  cause  of  poverty,  nor  any 
excuse  for  luxury  while  a  foot  of  land  is 
undeveloped. 

"The extreme  of  luxury,"  De  Lavelaye 
says,  "  is  that  which  destroys  the  product 
of  many  days'  labor  without  bringing  any 
rational  satisfaction  to  theowner."  Another 
author  calls  luxury  "that  which  creates 
imaginary  needs,  exaggerates  real  wants. 


i8o     THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

diverts  them  from  their  true  end,  estab- 
lishes a  habit  of  prodigality  in  society,  and 
offers  through  the  senses  a  satisfaction  of 
self-love  which  puffs  up,  but  does  not  nour- 
ish the  heart,  and  which  presents  to  others 
the  picture  of  a  happiness  to  which  they 
can  never  attain." 

Take  either  definition  you  will,  we 
behold  in  the  social  life  at  Newport  a 
measure  of  luxury  men  have  not  wit- 
nessed since  the  fall  of  Rome. 

There  was  a  time  when  economists 
apologized  for  luxury  on  the  ground  that 
those  who  supported  it  kept  money  in  cir- 
culation, thus  benefiting  the  poor ;  but  that 
was  when  scholars  believed  that  money  was 
wealth  in  itself,  and  fondly  believed  that 
one  might  eat  his  cake  and  have  it  too. 
" Money  changes  hands,"  they  said,  "and 
in  this  circulation  the  life  of  business  and 
commerce  consists.  When  money  is  spent, 
it  is  all  one  to  the  public  who  spends  it." 
We  have  passed  beyond  such  specious  ar- 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    i8i 

guments,  but  there  are  those  even  now  who 
think  if  a  man  builds  a  temporary  ballroom 
and  destroys  it  the  next  day,  some  one  has 
been  benefited.  The  workers  engaged  in 
building  and  demolishing  it  and  the  men 
who  employed  them  have,  no  doubt,  ob- 
tained an  immediate  benefit ;  yet  the  same 
money  might  have  built  ten  houses  to  be 
the  homes  of  generations  of  men.  Mrs. 
Croesus  has  had  her  vanishing  palace,  but 
ten  families  are  sleeping  without  shelter 
because  of  it.  She  should  beg  her  husband 
to  use  his  influence  at  Washington  to  re- 
strict immigration,  or  else  to  employ  his 
wealth  in  such  a  way  that  these  newcom- 
ers may  be  allowed  to  earn  a  proper  living. 
The  sentiments  which  give  rise  to  lux- 
ury, we  are  told,  are  vanity,  sensuality,  and 
the  instinct  of  adornment ;  but  the  greatest 
of  these  is  vanity,  the  desire  to  distinguish 
one's  self  and  to  appear  of  more  import- 
ance than  others.  It  is  this  aspect  of  lux- 
ury that  flaunts  itself  on  the  avenue  during 


i82    THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

the  season.  "  My  owner  is  rich,  rich,  rich,** 
toots  the  horn  of  yonder  marvelously 
upholstered  motor-car,  as  it  speeds  along 
regardless  of  the  pedestrian  exercising  his 
inalienable  right  to  cross  the  street.  **  My 
husband  is  a  multi-millionaire,"  this  splen- 
didly gowned  matron  declares,  trailing  her 
marvelously  wrought  skirt  in  the  mud  as 
she  steps  from  her  carriage,  while  her  foot- 
man, in  a  livery  more  splendid  than  that 
of  any  prince  in  Europe,  stares  vacantly 
into  space  and  touches  his  shining  hat. 
Yes,  these  people  are  distinguished,  but  it 
would  take  an  exceptionally  sharp  eye  to 
tell  which  in  this  hierarchy  of  ostentation 
is  of  the  most  importance. 

Condemnation  of  luxury,  however,  is 
not  condemnation  of  wealth.  Luxury  is  a 
disease  merely,  which  may  attack  the  suc- 
cessful individual  just  as  poverty  may  sink 
the  unsuccessful  one  to  lower  and  lower 
depths  of  despair;  and  is  no  more  a  neces- 
sary result  of  a  large  income  than  poverty 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    183 

is  of  a  small  one.  The  question,  after  all, 
is  not,  how  great  is  this  man's  fortune,  but 
what  does  he  do  with  it  ?  We  can  make 
no  quarrel  with  the  Captain  of  Industry 
because  he  possesses  so  many  dollars  that 
neither  he  nor  a  dozen  clerks  could  count 
them  in  a  twelvemonth,  if  he  has  earned 
those  dollars  by  his  skill  in  trade  and  is  con- 
scious of  his  stewardship.  He  entered  the 
race  on  even  terms  with  many  thousand 
others,  and  outstripped  them ;  by  the  very 
bent  of  his  genius  he  is  incapable  of  be- 
coming a  prey  to  luxury,  and  uses  his 
wealth  to  develop  new  railroads  and  open 
new  mines,  and  thus  feeds  with  a  bounti- 
ful hand  thousands  of  half-starved  immi- 
grants from  the  old  world.  Such  a  man  is 
a  benefactor  of  mankind,  as  truly  as  the 
greatest  philanthropist.  He  is  engaged  in 
a  real  service  to  the  nation,  and  his  great 
fortune  is  the  witness  of  his  service.  It  has 
become  the  fashion  of  late  to  belittle  these 
men  of  great  genius  and  to  forget  the  bene- 


1 84    THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

fits  which  they  have  bestowed;  but  this 
fashion  will  soon  pass  and  men  will  again 
restore  to  them  the  praise  which  is  their 
due. 

When,  in  the  economic  history  of  man, 
the  world  passed  from  the  agricultural, 
through  the  handicraft,  to  the  industrial 
stage,  the  multi-millionaire  became  inevit- 
able ;  when  the  first  factory  was  built,  the 
"trust"  was  its  certain  result.  The  trust 
and  the  multi-millionaire  are  essential  fac- 
tors in  our  industrial  evolution,  stepping- 
stones  to  a  new  and  better  order.  Very 
well,  you  say,  we  will  accept  the  multi- 
millionaire at  his  real  value ;  he  is  indeed 
a  necessary  factor  in  the  development  of 
our  industrial  world,  and  we  will  not  only 
cease  to  pursue  him  with  venomous  preju- 
dice, but  we  will  weigh  carefully  the  find- 
ings of  investigating  committees  and  allow 
the  rich  every  privilege  guaranteed  to  the 
humblest  citizen  by  the  Constitution.  We 
will  do  even  more  than  this :  we  will  admit 


THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY    185 

the  right  of  the  multi-millionaire  to  the 
fruit  of  his  industry,  and  allow  him  to  keep 
unmolested  his  numerous  residences,  his 
horses,  his  motor-cars  and  his  steam  yachts. 
But  what  right  has  his  son,  who  never 
earned  a  dollar  throughout  all  his  useless 
days,  to  inherit  this  vast  wealth  ?  Well,  that 
is  a  matter  for  future  philosophers  and 
future  statesmen  to  settle  among  themselves. 
When  the  evil  becomes  sufficiently  acute, 
they  will,  no  doubt,  find  some  remedy,  but 
for  the  present  we  have  more  immediate 
problems. 

We  do  not  know  toward  what  end  our 
American  Republic  is  moving,  whether  it 
be  toward  that  industrial  state  which  one 
enthusiastic  young  Socialist  has  prophesied 
will  be  a  reality  within  ten  years,  or 
whether  it  be  in  quite  a  different  direction. 
But  those  who  mark  the  course  of  events 
see  a  mighty  evolution  at  work  in  our 
national  life.  On  one  side  we  behold  the 
flood  of  immigration  typified  by  the  Greek 


i86    THE  CITY  OF  LUXURY 

fisher-folk  and  Portuguese  farm-hands, 
working  throughout  the  long  night  on 
Bren ton's  Point,  to  win  from  the  sea  a 
scanty  pile  of  firewood;  and  on  the  other, 
the  lords  of  wealth,  living  in  regal  splen- 
dor in  the  stately  homes  overlooking  the 
sea.  The  amazing  natural  resources  of  the 
new  world  have  brought  hither  these  hum- 
ble folk  to  a  richer  life  than  their  fathers 
ever  dreamed  might  be,  and  the  same  nat- 
ural resources  have  made  possible  this  life 
of  splendor  —  more  vast  if  not  more  mag- 
nificent than  the  world  has  known  before. 
What  this  evolution  means,  we  shall  none 
of  us  live  to  understand ;  for  the  American 
nation  is  still  in  its  infancy,  its  natural 
resources  are  still  undeveloped,  and  its 
contribution  to  civilization  still  lies  in  the 
future. 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U    .    S    .   A 


J^ 


'2  l^ 


THE  LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

Santa  Barbara 


STACK  COLLECTION 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW. 


31  1967 


If 


